CNN’s Egan: 177K Jobs Added in April, ‘We Were Bracing for a Slowdown in the Jobs Market, We Did Not Get That’

JIMENEZ: “All right, breaking moments ago, the April jobs report just released, showing steady gains amid some economic uncertainty. I want to bring in CNN‘s Matt Egan, who joins me now with more. All right, what are we seeing in the numbers? What is the context here?”
EGAN: “Yeah, Omar, we were bracing for a slowdown in the jobs market. We did not get that. We got steady hiring. This jobs market is just relentless. Let me run you through the key numbers.”
JIMENEZ: “Yeah, let‘s do it.”
EGAN: “177,000 jobs were added in the month of April. That easily beat forecasts for 135,000. So, not even close there. The unemployment rate stayed low. It stayed at 4.2%. When we look at where the jobs are right now, we‘re seeing solid gains in a number of places. Accommodation and food services, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, healthcare, private education, all of them adding jobs. One place where we saw a loss of jobs again was the federal government as the DOGE cuts to the workforce continue. But still, when we really zoom out here, this jobs market has been solid, right? I mean, 177,000 jobs, when we look at the trend, look at this, we saw that March was actually significantly revised lower, to 185,000 jobs added. That‘s down from the original report. So you can see that there really isn‘t all that much of a change here, and these are still very solid numbers. Now, this is a big contrast to what‘s shown up in the surveys, right? We‘ve seen so much gloom and doom from consumers, small business owners, CEOs. There‘s all of these concerns about the economy, about the trade war. One thing I would note, as we look at the market reaction, futures were up ahead of this, they remain up. One thing I would just stress is that this does not mean that the economy is out of the woods, right? It does not take off the risk of a recession, right, because there is the risk that there‘s a demand shock, there‘s a hit to the jobs market that just isn‘t visible yet in the data, right? That is something that we could be seeing more in May and in June. I talked to RMS economist Joe Brusuelas and he told me, look, in some ways this could be kind of like the last call for the economy, right? Kind of like on a on a Saturday night, this is the last song, enjoy it while it lasts, because there are all of these risks ahead. So I think the big question is, is this the calm before the storm, or is it the calm before the calm? And I think we‘re only going to get that answer in the next few weeks and months, and a lot of that is going to be decided by what happens with tariffs.”
JIMENEZ: “And the major data point in the sort of economic picture and what will likely be a forecast ahead. But that number coming in higher than expectations is the bottom line, at least for now.”