The Labor Department reported early Friday that U.S. employers added 148,000 jobs during December, a figure that pushed the yearly number over 2 million, but failed to meet analysts’ forecasts for the last month of the year. Unemployment remained steady at 4.1 percent. Average hourly wages rose 2.5 percent from a year earlier. For all of 2017, 2.1 million jobs were added—the seventh consecutive year job growth has surpassed 2 million. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected for 181,000 new jobs in December.
