THERE GOES THE JOBS RECOVERY STORYLINE

2014-09-05 08:18 by Karl Denninger

ROFL! Crap Jobs Number, Futures +10?

This is your stock market.

This is your stock market on heroin.

This is your market’s heart, addicted to a woman that should be in prison, and a clown-car stuffed with 535 critters that have ignored violations of their own laws, and in fact cheer them on, for 100 years — and thus should also be in prison.

Note: The “benefit” from being on heroin is temporary and the intermediate and longer-term impact is catastrophic.

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 142,000 in August, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services and in health care.

That’s a crap number.

What’s worse is that the unadjusted number from the household survey is negative 618,000!

You want more bad news? This month 1,343,000 people left the labor force, presumably because they were unable to find work.

Now granted, August is a month for firing and people giving up — at least over the last few years. It has been bad in both 2012 and 2013. Still, those who were expecting continued “strength” didn’t get it.

In addition the previously-seen “improvement” in the employment participation rate appears to have topped — so much for climbing out of that hole too.

Want a happy face on this report? There isn’t one, although if you force me to find something “good” I guess I can say this about it — it’s not much nastier than the August firing seasons of the last two years, and weekly hours didn’t go in the toilet (which would have added a massive amount of insult to the injury.)

See ‘ya next month — when you might be able to find a job.

53 Million Temps: All You Need To Know About The “Jobs Recovery”

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/05/2014 10:56 -0400

After years of ignoring the obvious, the Federal Reserve has been finally forced to admit that the labor force participation rate matters, and in fact has started to point it out as a clear negative when it comes to Yellen’s “dashboard” of thresholds which will allow the Fed to raise rates (for the obvious reason that the Fed is desperate to delay ZIRP as long as possible and is now highlighting all that is wrong with the economy, contrary to Obama who is still focusing on all the rigged greatness of the US recovery) and to do so is going through Zero Hedge archives to note all those things which everyone had ignored for years and which we have pointed out as structural failures of the so-called recovery.

So while we are happy to oblige the Fed with our tens of thousands of articles summarizing what is broken with the US economy thanks to, well, the Fed, here is another one: one which the Fed can use next year when the time to hike rates has come and gone, and when the Fed is once again scratching its head what to blame it on.

The chart below shows the civilian employment to population ratio: a convenient indicator of the real state of the US labor market which does away with the labor force entirely, and the associated rhetoric of why it may or may not be plunging, and merely focuses on two simple things: total population and the total civilian population of the US. One thing is clear: the ratio crashed when the depression started and has flatlined since. Which, incidentally, may be all you, and the Fed, needs to know about the recovery.

But wait, it gets worse, because according to the WSJ, roughly one in three U.S. workers is now a freelancer.

Wait, how many?

Fifty-three million Americans, or 34% of the nation’s workforce, qualify as freelancers, according to a new report from the Freelancers Union, a nonprofit organization, and Elance-oDesk Inc., a company that provides platforms for freelancers to find work. These individuals include independent contractors, temps, and moonlighters, among others.

So 53 million, let’s call them, temps? That is probably the most stunning number we have seen in years, and flips the entire premise of a “job recovery” on its head.

The experience of work has fractured in recent years, said Fabio Rosati, chief executive of Elance-oDesk. Layoffs that accompanied the recession forced many individuals to forge a living from short-term gigs, while online marketplaces such as Elance, TaskRabbit and Uber emerged to match independent workers with companies or individuals in need of labor. Plus, the rise of mobile technologies allow more people to work when and where they choose.

Or not work, considering there is no contract tying them to a job.

Independent workers “don’t have the workforce protections that have developed over the last 80 years. They are simply on their own,” said Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. An accurate census would help policymakers determine how to fill gaps, he said.

Counting the number of contingent workers has not been a high priority in Washington, DC over the last couple of decades. The number “is likely to be large and growing and there is no political advantage in signaling that fact,” Mr. Reich said.

The punchline:

Companies, eager to lower payroll costs and take advantage of a more flexible workforce, are relying more on contingent labor. According to the National Employment Law Project, temp jobs now constitute an all-time high of 2% of all positions in the U.S., or 2.8 million.

So the Fed is trying to boost wages and generate demand-pull inflation at a time when some 53 million US workers, or a third of total, are “freelancers”, which is a polite way of saying part-time workers. and “moonlighers.”

Well…. good luck!

No My Jobs, Man

“I don’t know if the people on Wall Street are not really getting out and seeing what’s really going on.

When you go to small towns, like I do, and talk to people – people don’t have much confidence in the numbers you hear.”

Ronnie Squires, Winner of CNBC’s Guess the Jobs Number Contest

The Non-Farm Payrolls number sucked out loud with a fairly stupendous miss. If you back out the imaginary jobs from the Birth Death report, the economy added about 40,000 real jobs, of a generally low quality. Chief Strategists and economists took delight in the tenth of a percent decrease in unemployment, a generally misleading statistic. And of course, stocks rallied.

Given the need for the central banks to keep printing money, and the ECB’s endorsement of that approach, the hit on the metals this week makes quite a bit of sense from a perception management standpoint of the porcine persuasion.

Here is my most probable forecast for the future. Be sure to make a note of it.

The next time there is a financial crisis, which is likely to be in the not too distant future, almost to a person the economists and talking heads of the status quo will express shock and bewilderment saying, ‘who could have seen this coming?’ Unless of course there is some foreign scapegoat who can be conveniently blamed for the collapse of a house of cards.

And then, from their Olympian heights of privilege, the overpaid pundits will quickly fall back into their most comfortable, ideologically blind slogans. There is too much government, or there is not enough stimulus or the unfortunate many are just lazy and stupid.

And meanwhile, given the lack of reform of the financial and political system, the average American family, which they will all claim to uphold and revere, is being led down a blind alley of officially tolerated corruption, and strangled.

Jesse