Hope people continue this monthly thread.
Lol
Not useless, but it does not mean what people think and in fact its only truly good use is to compare period 1 to period 2 (even that with caveats sometimes )
Yeah, it’s useless.
I thought you were going to say that “the Market’s always right”! 
Clearly the labor market has remained strong, but as noted it is not a comprehensive indicator on the strength of the overall economy. There are numerous concerns as has been discussed in other threads like this:
Also, when it comes to the jobs report, don’t get to giddy unless we are talking about good paying private sector jobs.
A hammer is useless as a screwdriver.
A piece of paper is useless as a bed.
GDP is useless for this and useless for that and people often try to use is as synonymous with “the economy” . . . GDP is useless for that purpose.
GDP is useless as a synonym for “the economy” because it measures only spending.
It assumes “all other things are equal,” which is not always the case.
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I’ll probably explain its two major inadequacies (as a synonym for “the economy”) but for now, I want to let that point sink in.
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Not for in.
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That is 100% correct and it is the point I am making. . . PLUS when we look at the details we see the change from Apr to May is not as rosy as the top-line number suggests.
First, 58% of the jobs created have absolutely nothing to do with a growing economy. They obviously have to do with
- a growing government and
- the simple fact that summer is coming. (already discussed)
Second, When we mine the data (in ways that is perhaps inappropriate for a one-month data set) and extrapolate across 12 months some disturbing trends exist in the other 42% of jobs.
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Parlor trick.
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Yup.
Gov’t hire people to dig holes and fill them back up and says “Look there are a lot of jobs. I have created a great economy,”
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I know, I used to be one of them.
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Extrapolating across 12 months . . . . (seasonally adjusted annualized) we see
- semiconductor an electronic component manufacture down 4%
- mining jobs (except oil and gas) down 3%
- mining jobs except metals, oil and gas down 6%
- furniture manufacturing down 12%
- textile manufacturing down 23%
- wholesale and warehousing down 12%
- electronics and appliance retailing down 6%
- pipeline transportation down 3%
- web search, web portals etc down 12%
- retail banking down 4%
- commercial banking down 6%
All of this is consistent with the narrative “The economy sucks, especially in industries the Whitehouse has targeted as ‘bad for the environment.’”
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We also see
- Electrical equipment manufacture up 7%
- Motor vehicle and parts manufacture (presumably EV) up 8%
- “Other” motor vehicle dealers up 8%
- tax prep and accounting up 11%
- debt collectors up 5%
- private education up 7%
- homeless shelters and food banks up 12%
This part is consistent with the narrative “The only areas of the job market that are growing are those areas receiving specific government subsidies, (like EVS) or growing because of specific government policies (like hiring IRS agents, opening the borders and turning schools into indoctrination camps)”
@Adam
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Excellent post! This is exactly why The Jobs Report is a limited indicator of how good or poor the overall economy is.
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I don’t know this guy Joseph Politano (maker of the chart)
but here is his information (Since 2000, we went from the top to the bottom)
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The guys who made this chart are pretty good prognosticators-for-hire and do not have a political bias.
With so much M2 floating around, naybe this time really is different, but the % of recent layoffs that are NOT temporary is at the same point where recessions tend to begin.
Here’s a more bearish perspective on the labor market going forward:
The jobless rate is based on a survey of 60,000 households and is generally considered less reliable than the poll of 122,000 business and government agencies that produced May’s headline job gain of 339,000.
Also, the pullback in payrolls in the household survey can be traced to a big drop in unincorporated self-employed workers, a decrease that the survey of establishments doesn’t capture, says economist Dante DeAntonio of Moody’s Analytics,
Still, the household survey shows nearly 2 million fewer workers overall than the establishment survey, Barclays notes, reflecting a longer-term disparity. And economists say the household survey is generally better at highlighting turning points in the economy and labor market, such as when the economy is heading toward a recession.
Then there’s this:
The average number of hours U.S. employees worked dipped from 34.4 to 34.3 in May, the lowest level since the early days of the pandemic in April 2020. That shows consumer demand may be easing but employers are opting to hold onto workers – a practice known as labor hoarding – because of persistent COVID-related worker shortages the past couple of years, Bank of America suggests. Instead, they’re trimming the hours of existing employees.
But that practice can go on only so long if sales and profits don’t pick up. The earnings of S&P 500 companies fell 2.1% in the first quarter, the second straight quarterly decline, according to FactSet.
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All jobs reports are rosey with the Kid Sniffer at the helm. It was all recession-depression-WW3 when the real-physical obsession with the Orange Guy was at a fever pitch.
Totally not cult-like.
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It’s funny how this thread turned into the
One can only hope choir.
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Please elaborate on what’s wrong with the dialogue here? The OP is in the form of a question, which is typically encouraged to promote a dialectic. And mind you this is in time when the Fed is has been raising interest rates, and likely will continue, with the objective of dealing with inflation.
