back to precrisis levels. the lowest unemployment rate since april 2008. when you dig into these numbers the sector growth was impressive and widespread. and you had growth and jobs at the higher end of the income spectrum. these are kind of numbers good for recent college graduates quite frankly and people who have a college degree. those are the jobs we re seeing grow. everyone s trying to figure out what this means for the federal reserve when it meets in two weeks. there s a lot of discussion about what this kind of job market performance is going to mean for the federal reserve. the u.s. economy is getting back on track and these numbers confirm that but not quite as strong as some had hoped. at least it s on the positive side. he has become the face of a humanitarian crisis, his small
substantial job gains. that s according to the labor department. unemployment held steady at 6.3%, the lowest rate in more than five years. investors seemed happy about this news on wall street today. let s take a look at the dow now. 16,903. it s been a healthy day. we re closing in on 17,000 it would appear. gerri willis joins us now, host of the willis report on the fox business network. the markets seem to like this. the markets seem to like it, editorial writers seem to like it. you should have seen the coverage of these numbers, all upbeat. and why? because we re now back to employment levels of 2008, this is precrisis. this chart shows you where we ve been and where we ve come back to. so people are celebrating that fact today. all right. so i m looking at that chart and that looks good. so why is it that americans in whole when you look at fox news surveys and others say that people feel bad about this economy. here s another one for you.
a lot of people are getting more confidence about the economy but many still think a full economic recovery is years away. the opinion on the economy, only 3% believe it s completely recovered, 40% say the recovery has started, 31% say conditions have stabilized, 27% believe the economy is still in a downturn. a lot of people aren t yet convinced that things are so much better than they were a few years ago. well, there s two things going on there. for starters, this has been the longest recovery in postwar history. it s taken 40 months for us to get back to those precrisis levels of employment. that s a long time. the other thing, it depends where you are on the economic food chain. people who have college grease never really suffered as those without them. somebody who has just a high school degree is not feeling recovery. overall, wages as a whole, as i said, have been flat since the crisis and recovery began.
217,000 jobs were added in may. the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 6.3%. let s bring in our analyst joining us from new york. the markets, it looks like the dow jones right now going up a bit. maybe we ll show our viewer what s happening right now. it s up, what, about 73. another 200,000-plus new jobs created last month. absolutely, i mean, this is now four months of really strong jobs reports. what s good about this one is the job gains were really broad-based. they were across all sectors. manufacturing, retail, trade, tourism, health care, everything. you know, the two areas of concern, though, it must be said, are that the major growth is still in lower wage jobs, and wage growth overall is only about 2%. that s about half of what it was in the precrisis era. that still has economists concerned. the fact that another 200,000-plus jobs created, but
it? i don t think that we have had that much of a wealth effect. if you look at the whole funs data, household wealth is back where it was precrisis, but the gains are very heavily secured toward the upper en. the federal reserve bank of st. louis did a study to look to see how evenly the gains from the stock market haves been. the top 7% of households, healthiest howholds, have seen their holdings value go up. the other 93% have seen them go down. the truth is that middle income and upper middle income households just haven t been aboard the rally, so they missed and it consumer confidence has had the slowest recovery we have seen. it s still lower today than it was at the depths of the 2001 recession. so it s moving in the right direction, but we re looking at a pretty soft christmas. the one area that is doing very well, though, the upper end. art auctions in new york. record prices for all the