2014.07.0323:14:44UTC+00US notches 5th straight month of strong job gains

Newly released data from the US Labor Department has helped strengthen forecasts of a continued run this year for the world’s largest economy.

The government report detailed how 288,000 new jobs were created in June to extend a streak that saw at least 200,000 nonfarm payrolls added to the market each month starting in February. Previous tallies made in April and May were revised up as well with an additional 29,000 jobs. The last time the US labor market had numbers this impressive was in the late 1990s during the emergence of technology services.

As a result of the consistent improvement, unemployment in the country has fallen to 6.1% from the 6.3% of May to record its lowest rate in almost six years. With this latest data, the average of number of jobs created per month in the first half of the year climbed up to the nine year best of 231,000.

While labor gains were present across a variety of sectors in June, majority could be found in the service industry which posted its best advance in two years of 236,000. Meanwhile, the number of the government’s employees was made larger by the entry of 26,000 jobs and both manufacturing and construction continued their monthly increase streaks of eleven and six respectively.

The figures lend themselves to the sentiment that the contraction experienced by the country during the first quarter of 2014 was mostly due to a particularly harsh winter season instead of an underlying fault in the economy. Since then, indications have mostly pointed towards the US rebounding greatly in the remaining quarters of the year.

Stocks on the US market advanced on the news led by the Dow Jones industrial average which reached a milestone by breaching 17,000 for the first time.