Rate hasn’t been this low

The unemployment rate hasn’t been this low for this long since Nixon was president

From CNN's Matt Egan and Alicia Wallace

This job market keeps rewriting the history books.

The latest superlative: The unemployment rate has now stayed safely below 4% for two full years. The last time the unemployment rate was this low for this long, Richard Nixon was in the White House.

“The fact that the unemployment rate has been below 4% for 24 months straight for the first time since 1967 is truly remarkable,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist and principal at RSM US, told CNN. “And that’s the word I keep saying as I look through this report: ‘This is remarkable.’ ‘Remarkable,’ is the takeaway here.”

More than a year ago, it seemed all but certain that the labor market would feel the effects of — and potentially be reeling from — the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign. But 11 hikes and four pauses later, the US job market is registering one of the longest periods of expansion this century.

The unemployment rate stayed below 4% for 27 months in a row, starting in November 1967 under President Lyndon B. Johnson through January 1970, according to federal data. 

During Covid-19, the unemployment rate spiked to as high as 14.8% in April 2020 before falling rapidly.

Many economists expected the jobless rate would rise above 4% as the Federal Reserve spiked interest rates to fight inflation. As recently as last March, Fed officials projected the unemployment rate would be 4.5% in 2023.