The US employment report for December shows 216,000 jobs were added in the month, much more than the 175,000 economists polled by Bloomberg had predicted. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.7%. Economists had been expecting it to rise to 3.8%. The labor force participation rate fell to 62.5% from November's 62.8%.

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Editor's note: This article was written by Stephanie Mikulich

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: A very strong report here, much stronger than what the Street was expecting. 216,000 jobs added to the US economy in the month of December. That was beating the Street's expectations of 175,000. Taking a look at the unemployment rate that actually coming in line with what we saw last month. So 3.7% below what the Street had been expecting at 3.8%.

The average hourly numbers here month over month, we saw growth of 4/10 of a percent, which is more than what we had initially expected. That year over year change of just about 4.1%. You can see the reaction in the futures market, at least initially off of these headline numbers. We're looking at losses still across the board. Dow futures pointing to an open of off just about one half of a percent here, Myles.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah. And you look at the labor market here, now we're going to get into it quite a bit. But an interesting report for the participation rate and thinking about we saw a slight downtick there, 62 and 1/2 percent from 62.8% in November. So really a lack of participation I think is going to be the math here driving down the unemployment rate.

So if there's a negative way to interpret a 3.7% unemployment rate, perhaps we saw a slight uptick in unemployment earlier this year on an increase in participation. Perhaps that is the slight rub within this report. But I think ultimately, a story of slowing but slowing less than expected overall jobs growth and really the simplest way I think that policymakers look at the labor market is just are more people getting jobs than are losing jobs. And we continue to see that trend remain the case.