the report

At 8:30 am eastern time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Labor Department released its monthly Employment Situation report for July 2015.

The figures, a gain of +215,000 jobs, all but 5,000 of them in the private sector, were virtually identical with the consensus estimates of domestic macroeconomists.  Revisions of prior months’ data were mildly positive–a total gain of another +14,000 jobs.

Wage gains continued at an unremarkable +2.1% year on year advance.  The unemployment rate remained steady at 5.3%, which is low by historical standards.

significance

It seems to me that this report pretty much removes any doubt that the Fed will begin raising the Fed Funds rate next month.

As I’m writing this, financial markets seem to be taking the news in stride.  We’ll see more as the day progresses.

What this report reinforces, as have prior ES reports in 2014-15, is that the economy in the US is growing strongly enough to create jobs for all those leaving schools and entering the workforce for the first time, plus another one million or so positions a year to eat into the rolls of the unemployed.