Friday’s U.S. employment report painted an encouraging picture of the labor market and should reassure Federal Reserve officials that the economy is improving as they have been predicting. It will intensify their debate about when to start raising short-term interest rates, strengthening the hand of those officials who want to move sooner, but the question is far from resolved. The surprise in the report was the stability of the U.S. unemployment rate at 6.3% after 0.4 percentage-point decline in April. A number of officials expected to see a rebound in the jobless rate in May, but it remained at 6.3%. That’s good ... (full story)