US jobs report for August could point to a moderating pace of hiring as economy gradually slows

abcnews.go.com:

Slowly and steadily, an overheated American job market is returning to room temperature

WASHINGTON — Slowly and steadily, an overheated American job market is returning to room temperature.

The Labor Department is expected to report Friday that U.S. employers — companies, nonprofits and government agencies combined — added 170,000 jobs last month, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet. That would be down from the 187,000 jobs that were added in July and would be the lowest monthly gain since December 2020.

“We are beginning to see this slow glide into a cooler labor market,’’ said Becky Frankiewicz, chief commercial officer at the employment firm ManpowerGroup. “Make no mistake: Demand is cooling off.… But it’s not a freefall.’’

The latest sign that the pace of hiring is losing some momentum — without going into a nosedive — would be welcomed by the Federal Reserve, which has been trying to tame inflation with a series of 11 interest rate hikes. The Fed is hoping to achieve a rare “soft landing,” in which it would manage to slow hiring and growth enough to cool price increases without tipping the world’s largest economy into a recession. Economists have long been skeptical that the Fed's policymakers would succeed.

But optimism has been growing. Since peaking at 9.1% in June 2022, year-over-year inflation has dropped more or less steadily. It was 3.2% in July. But the economy, though growing more slowly than it did during the boom that followed the pandemic recession of 2020, has defied the squeeze of increasingly high borrowing costs. The gross domestic product — the economy's total output of goods and services — rose at a respectable 2.1% annual rate from April to June. Consumers continued to