U.S. employers added a solid 187,000 jobs in August in sign of a still-resilient labor market

The Fed wants to see hiring slow because intense demand for labor tends to inflate wages and feed inflation. The central bank hopes to achieve a rare “soft landing,” in which its rate hikes would manage to slow hiring, borrowing and spending enough to curb high inflation without causing a deep recession.

Optimism about a soft landing has been growing. The economy, though growing more slowly than it did in the boom that followed the pandemic recession of 2020, has defied the squeeze of increasingly high borrowing costs. The gross domestic product — the economy’s total output of…