How Bad Was U.S. Jobs Data? One Of The Worst In More Than 5 Years

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump took to Twitter within minutes of Friday's job reports that showed the U.S. economy added 38,000 jobs.

"Terrible jobs report just reported. Only 38,000 jobs added. Bombshell!"

Taking politics out of the equation, the question many are asking is if Trump's statement has some validity to it. In at least one aspect, Trump's assessment is correct as Friday's report showed the economy added jobs at the slowest pace in more than five years.

According to MarketWatch, not only did the economy produce 38,000 new jobs, nearly half a million people dropped out of the labor force. In fact, the increase in hiring was the smallest dating back to the fall of 2010.

If the jobs report were to exclude a major strike at Verizon Communications Inc. VZ, the number of jobs created would have been twice as high. Regardless, it will still fall significantly short of the 155,000 job gains estimated by MarketWatch and the 164,000 figure economists interviewed by Reuters estimated.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government revised the number of new jobs created in April to 123,000 from 166,000 and March's numbers were also revised to 186,000 from 208,000.

"Very disappointing," JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade told MarketWatch. "That's two months in a row of disappointing job reports. We are heading in the wrong direction.

U.S. equities were trading lower Friday, but did bounce off their intra-day lows. The Dow Jones index was trading at 17,780.27, down 0.33 percent on the day but traded as low as 17,689.68.

Financial stocks were also trading lower as the Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund XLF shed 1.60 percent by Friday afternoon. The likelihood of a rate hike in the coming weeks will likely be re-examined by Fed officials who said that any rate hike would be dependent on economic data.