The US labor market suddenly deteriorated in April

The situation on the US labor market suddenly deteriorated in April. So only 266,000 jobs were created outside of agriculture and thus far fewer than expected, as the government in Washington announced. Economists had expected 978,000 - after a revised job increase of 770,000 in March. "What was that? Most economists had already sharpened their pencils to celebrate an increase in employment of over a million, and then this disappointment," asked LBBW analyst Dirk Chlench. The financial markets reacted immediately to the unexpectedly bad data. The euro rose against the dollar, the price of gold expanded its gains, and ten-year US bond yields fell. As the pace of job creation has now slowed again, it will take even longer "until the still large employment gap is more or less closed," said Bastian Hepperle from Bankhaus Lampe. Ulrich Wortberg from Helaba said that compared to the situation before the crisis, around eight million jobs were still missing. VP Bank chief economist Thomas Gitzel expects that in the coming months there will be "an even more significant build-up of new positions". Because the creation of new jobs is only postponed. Then a monthly plus of two million is also possible. US companies may currently have problems "to find enough workers with the right qualification profile," emphasized LBBW banker Chlench. "It is also hard to believe that a job cut should have taken place at couriers of all places." Because while there were numerous new hires in sectors such as gastronomy, the leisure industry and education, jobs were lost in temporary work and courier services, as the authority for labor market statistics announced. According to statistics, around 9.8 million people were unemployed in the United States in April. The unemployment rate for April, found in a separate survey, was 6.1 percent, up from 6.0 in March. Tens of millions of jobs were lost in the United States during the crisis.