Latest Jobs Numbers Don’t Match Trump’s ‘No Jobs’ Message

(Bloomberg) -- With just four days to go until Election Day, the U.S. government released its final snapshot of how the U.S. economy is doing, reporting that payrolls climbed by 161,000 in the month of October while the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.9 percent.

This is "disastrous," according to a statement released by the campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump, who'd claimed that Americans "can't get jobs, because there are no jobs" when he launched his presidential bid. In fact, this marks the seventy-third straight month of job gains and means that more than 3.2 million jobs have been added since Trump's remarks back in June 2016.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate is actually up a few fractions of a percentage point compared to May, when it hit 4.7 percent, but remains at less than half the 10 percent peak it reached seven years ago. It's also down from when Trump launched his campaign. Since then he's repeatedly questioned the accuracy and validity of the official unemployment figures.

To contact the author of this story: Andre Tartar in New York at atartar@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kelly Bare at kbare1@bloomberg.net.