Dow climbs more than 800 points after May's better-than-expected jobs report

The New York Stock Exchange
(Image credit: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)

The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed more than 800 points on Friday following a shock jobs report that showed the unemployment rate surprisingly decline.

The Dow rose 829 points to 27,110 following the release of the May jobs report from the Labor Department, which showed that the unemployment rate declined to 13.3 percent in May as the economy added 2.5 million jobs, CNBC reports. The S&P 500 also climbed 2.6 percent.

While the unemployment rate remains high, it wasn't expected to decline at all in May — economists forecasted a rise to almost 20 percent and predicted 8 million more jobs would be lost. The report came after all 50 states began to reopen their economies, and the Labor Department said that the "improvements in the labor market reflected a limited resumption of economic activity that had been curtailed in March and April" during the pandemic.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

As The Washington Post notes, the Dow closed above 27,000 for the first time in three months, and Wall Street is "close to putting investors back where they were in January," prior to the coronavirus pandemic taking a devastating toll on the U.S. economy. The Dow "was only down 5.0 percent year to date after dropping as much as 34.6 percent in 2020," CNBC reports, while according to The New York Times, the S&P 500 is "coming close to recouping all of its losses for 2020 so far."

Explore More
Brendan Morrow

Brendan worked as a culture writer at The Week from 2018 to 2023, covering the entertainment industry, including film reviews, television recaps, awards season, the box office, major movie franchises and Hollywood gossip. He has written about film and television for outlets including Bloody Disgusting, Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Heavy and The Celebrity Cafe.