UPDATE - US adds 339,000 jobs in May, unemployment rises to 3.7%

UPDATES WITH PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN'S COMMENTS, INFLATION FIGURES

By Ovunc Kutlu

ISTANBUL (AA) - The US economy added 339,000 jobs in May, coming much higher than market estimates, but the unemployment rate unexpectedly rose to 3.7%, the Labor Department announced on Friday.

The market expectation for nonfarm payrolls was a 180,000 gain in May.

Job additions for April were revised up by 41,000 from 253,000 to 294,000, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The unemployment rate, on the other hand, surprisingly rose 0.3 percentage point to 3.7% in May, from 3.4% in April.

The market estimate for the figure was to come in at 3.5%.

The number of unemployed people in the US rose by 440,000 to reach 6.1 million in May.

Both the labor force participation rate at 62.6% and the employment-population ratio at 60.3% remained unchanged last month.

US President Joe Biden said his administration has so far created over 13 million jobs since he took office, adding: "That is more jobs in 28 months than any President has created in an entire 4-year term," according to a statement by the White House.

"We also learned that the unemployment rate has been under 4 percent for 16 months in a row. The last time our nation had such a long stretch of low unemployment was in the 1960s," he added.

Biden noted that annual inflation rate has fallen for 10 consecutive months, while it is down more than 40% since last summer.

Annual consumer inflation in the US came in at 4.9% in April, the smallest 12-month increase since the period ending April 2021.

The latest figure is a sharp decline from last June's 9.1% yearly gain, which was the largest increase since November 1981.