The headline number shows unemployment dipping to 8.5 percent. More jobs were created last month than expected. Happy days are here again!
Or not. Every release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics sends me to Zero Hedge, where the miners dig into the numbers and find that the jobs headlines are rarely what they appear to be.
Consider this:
…the unemployment rate trickery still continues, with labor force participation (prior revised), now at a 27 year low of 64%, and the labor force itself declined by 50K from 153,937 to 153,887. In fact, persons not in the labor force have increased by 7.5 million since January 2007! Bottom line – dropping out of labor statistics is the new killing it.
Here’s the bad news in handy chart form:
According to the number-crunchers:
…America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.
But…but…what about all those new jobs created last month? They were above expectations! Eh, not really:
…Morgan Stanley’s David Greenlaw reports, 42,000 of the 200,000 is basically a seasonal quirk, which will be given back next month, meaning the true adjusted number is 158,000, essentially right on top of the expectation. From David Greenlaw: “some of the strength in this report should be discounted because of an seasonal quirk in the courier category of payrolls (Fed-ex, UPS, etc). Jobs in this sector jumped 42,000 in December, repeating a pattern seen in 2009 and 2010… We should see a payback in next month’s report.”
This is rough stuff. Even damning. One would expect Republican PR machines great and small would be tearing these numbers apart with glee.
Instead, we get warmed-over boilerplate.
A lost opportunity.
And the Kaine campaign chimes in
With its own bland brand of piffle that includes calls for “investing in things,” “finding common ground” and doing it all in a “balanced way.” Good grief.
Is it too early to have a cocktail?
