Here's your full preview of the upcoming jobs report

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July 6, 2017 7:58 PM

Job creation in the US has slowed down this year.

The June jobs report will be released at 8:30 a.m. ET on Friday.

Job creation in the US has slowed down this year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The difference between the number of people who gained jobs and those who were laid off or fired has averaged 160,000 since the start of this year.

That's down from 187,000 in the same timeframe last year.

Via Bloomberg, here's what Wall Street is expecting for June:

+178,000
4.3%
+0.3%
+2.6%
34.4

Many economists expected fewer job gains because the unemployment rate was at a 16-year low, suggesting a lot of the spare capacity in the jobs market created by the recession has been absorbed.

But the slowdown is complicated by the fact that other data on the labor market tell a different story.

For example, ADP's private-employment report, which is based on payrolls the firm processes instead of surveys, has shown an expansion in hiring this year. The gap between the jobs numbers from ADP and BLS on a six-month-average basis is the widest since at least 2012.

The Conference Board's labor-market differential, the percentage of those who say jobs are plentiful less those who say they're hard to get, widened to 14.8 points in June, the highest level since August 2001.

And the number of initial jobless claims continues to remain very low, at 248,000 this week.

That leaves the BLS jobs report as an outlier, although it's the one that carries the most weight in markets. Its slowdown is "

"Upward pressure on inflation from resource utilization [including labor] may be limited, as the relationship between these two variables appeared to be weaker than in previous decades" the Fed said in the minutes of its June meeting published on Wednesday.

The labor-force participation rate is another thing worth watching for in Friday's jobs report, since it could give clues as to whether the unemployment rate is falling because fewer people are working, or because more people are getting job offers.

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