Hiring off sharply

WASHINGTON — Cautious employers added just 75,000 new jobs in May, the fewest in seven months, in a fresh sign the national economy is losing momentum heading into summer.

Rising energy prices, higher borrowing costs and a cooling of the once red-hot housing market are the main forces shaping the slowdown in the country’s overall economic activity. Those factors, along with sagging consumer confidence, are making companies wary of bulking up their payrolls in case the economy takes an unexpected turn for the worse, analysts said.

Taking a bit of the sting out of the sluggish job creation was the fact that the nation’s unemployment rate dipped to 4.6 percent, the lowest in nearly 5 years.

Still, when the Labor Department’s employment snapshot, released Friday, is viewed as a whole, it points to slower — not faster — economic speed ahead, analysts said. Wage growth also slowed, a development that may be disheartening to workers but comforted economists who worry about inflation taking off.

“The May employment report was weak in almost all dimensions,” said Nigel Gault, economist at Global Insight.

Economic growth in the April-to-June quarter will probably clock in around a 2.5 percent pace or slightly better. That would mark a deceleration from the brisk 5.3 percent pace logged in the first quarter.

The count of new jobs generated last month was the smallest since October, when hiring practically stalled as the fallout from the Gulf Coast hurricanes jolted companies. It fell far short of the 170,000 new jobs economists had predicted.