Good jobs report? Bad jobs report? It all depends

The unemployment rate didn’t budge from its 6.3 percent mark in May, and employers added fewer jobs than economists expected. 

OR…

Employers created a substantial number of new jobs for the fourth straight month and the unemployment rate held steady at 6.3 percent, the lowest rate in more than five years.

Those two sentences don’t seem to be in complete agreement, and yet their conclusions were drawn from the same data. The government and business numbers that are reported every day, and especially the monthly jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department, all depend on context; the reaction to them is in the eye of the beholder.

If you’re a glass half-full economist, a slow report can be cause of optimism. If you’re a worrywart, a strong number can find a way to scare you.

Try our jobs number headline generator above and you can see what we mean. Pick whether you think the jobs report is happy, sad or mixed… and it’ll spits out a headline to match you’re thinking.