TORONTO _ The Canadian dollar was steady as North American stock markets began trading Friday with little movement.
The loonie traded at 79.97 cents US, unchanged from Thursday's close.
The S&P/TSX composite index was up 11.75 points at 15,031.14, after plunging 135.29 points on Thursday.
The Dow Jones industrial average was down 1.2 points at 17,904.38, the Nasdaq index fell 1.38 points to 5,057.74, and the S&P 500 advanced 1.03 points to 2,096.87.
On the commodity markets, the July crude contract was down 18 cents at US$57.82 a barrel and the August gold contract fell $10.70 to US$1,164.50 an ounce.
U.S. employers added a robust 280,000 jobs in May, showing that the economy has regained momentum after starting 2015 in a deep slump.
The unemployment rate ticked up to 5.5 per cent from 5.4 per cent in April, the government said Friday. But that occurred for a good reason: Hundreds of thousands more people began seeking jobs in May. Not all of them found work and so were counted as unemployed.
Last month's strong job growth suggests that employers remained confident enough to keep hiring even after the economy shrank during the first three months of the year. The government also revised up its estimate of job growth during March and April by a combined net 32,000.
The steady hiring should help drive the economy through the rest of the year.
``We've restored income for well over 3 million people over the past 12 months, and that's adding a lot of spending power to the economy,'' said Carl Tannenbaum, an economist at Northern Trust.
The rise in the number of people looking for work also sounded a collective note of confidence, Tannenbaum suggested.
``That suggests that those who have been on the fringes of the job market are seeing opportunities,'' Tannenbaum said.