The BLS reported the fabulous news this morning that the job market is fucking booming. Everyone has a job and we’re making gobs of dough. It does make you ponder why the Federal Reserve needs to keep interest rates at 0% if everything is so fucking fantastic. It does make you ponder why corporation after corporation is reporting shitty earnings and warning that 2015 will be worse. It does make you ponder why retailers keep going bankrupt if consumers are employed and flush with cash. After perusing the data, here are a couple observations:
- The birth death spreadsheet adjustment which is supposed to capture new businesses hiring, was by far the most beneficial January adjustment in the last decade. How many new businesses starting up in your area?
- There are 2.8 million more working age Americans than one year ago, while the number of employed is up 3 million. You would think the unemployment rate would only be slightly lower. Nope. It plunged from 6.6% to 5.7%. Because 1.1 million people leave the labor force during an economic recovery. Right?
- Wages went up by 2.2% in the last year. So, when you factor in a true inflation rate of things you need to live your everyday life of at least 5%, real wages fell. Maybe that explains why Christmas spending was atrocious.
- The labor participation rate of 62.9% is lower than last January and hovers near 30 year lows.
- The employment to population ratio also hovers near 30 year lows. Who needs to work when you have foodstamps and Obamacare?
- Of the supposedly 257,000 new jobs added, only 58,000 (22.5%) were goods producing jobs. The rest were low paying retail, social services, food services, healthcare, and education service jobs. Last January 54% of the new jobs were in goods producing industries. The layoffs in the high paying energy sector have just begun. There will be hundreds of thousands who lose their jobs due to the plunge in oil prices.
I await Janet Yellen having a surprise news conference to announce an interest rate increase because the jobs market is booming and wages are soaring. Wait for it. Bueller? Bueller?
January Payrolls Smash Expectations Rising By 257,000 As Hourly Earnings Surge Most Since November 2008
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/06/2015 08:35 -0500
So much for expectations that January, missing on 9 out of 10 previous occasions, will miss again, as the BLS just reported that in January a whopping 257K jobs were added, far above the 228K expected, and up from December’s 252K which was revised as part of the annual BLS data revision to 329K, a whopping 147K revision! More impressive: the household survey reported that a whopping 759K jobs were created in January.
The unemployment rate rose from 5.6% to 5.7%, above the 5.6% expected.
But most notable, the average hourly earnings surged from last month’s -0.2% by a whopping 0.5%, the highest monthly jump in average hourly earnings since November 2008. On an annual basis, the increase was a less impressive 2.2%:
It remains to be seen just how this is happening with mass layoffs in the oil patch, but what is now practically assured is that the Fed will have no choice but to hike as soon as June.
More from the report:
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 257,000 in January. Job gains occurred in retail trade, construction, health care, financial activities, and manufacturing. After incorporating revisions for November and December (which include the impact of the annual benchmark process), monthly job gains averaged 336,000 over the past 3 months. (See table B-1 and summary table B. See the note at the end of this news release and table A for information about the annual benchmark process.)
- Employment in retail trade rose by 46,000 in January. Three industries accounted for half of the jobs added–sporting goods, hobby, book, and music stores (+9,000); motor vehicle and parts dealers (+8,000); and nonstore retailers (+6,000).
- Construction continued to add jobs in January (+39,000). Employment increased in both residential and nonresidential building (+13,000 and +7,000, respectively). Employment continued to trend up in specialty trade contactors (+13,000). Over the prior 12 months, construction had added an average of 28,000 jobs per month.
- In January, health care employment increased by 38,000. Job gains occurred in offices of physicians (+13,000), hospitals (+10,000), and nursing and residential care facilities (+7,000). Health care added an average of 26,000 jobs per month in 2014.
- Employment in financial activities rose by 26,000 in January, with insurance carriers and related activities (+14,000) and securities, commodity contracts, and investments (+5,000) contributing to the gain. Financial activities has added 159,000 jobs over the past 12 months.
- Manufacturing employment increased by 22,000 over the month, including job gains in motor vehicles and parts (+7,000) and wood products (+4,000). Over the past 12 months, manufacturing has added 228,000 jobs.
- Professional and technical services added 33,000 jobs in January, including increases in computer systems design (+8,000) and architectural and engineering services (+8,000).
- In January, employment in food services and drinking places continued to trend up (+35,000). In 2014, the industry added an average of 33,000 jobs per month.
- Employment in other major industries, including mining and logging, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, information, and government, showed little change over the month.
From Bloomberg: “Just an extraordinary rate of jobs growth. The recovery we’ve waited all these years for is finally here.”
“Labor force up a cool 1.051mm in a single month.”
“Participation rate in U.S. rises to 62.9% in Jan from 62.7%”
“Last month revised up to 329K from 252K”
“Maybe the strongest print of the whole recovery, and government still cut 10k jobs.”
“January Payrolls Smash Expectations Rising By 257,000 As Hourly Earnings Surge Most Since November 2008”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-06/payrolls-in-u-s-increase-more-than-forecast-along-with-wages
Gallup CEO: Number of Full-Time Jobs as Percent of Population Is Lowest It’s Ever Been
Gallup CEO and Chairman Jim Clifton doubled-down on his comments earlier in the week on the misleading Obama unemployment rate.
“The number of full-time jobs, and that’s what everybody wants, as a percent of the total population, is the lowest it’s ever been… The other thing that is very misleading about that number is the more people that drop out, the better the number gets. In the recession we lost 13 million jobs. Only 3 million have come back. You don’t see that in that number. “
What did Orwell call that? DoublePlusGood?
Apparently until the ‘right’ people are affect it never happened or doesn’t matter.
If any REAL numbers were ever reported, I would not believe them because I’m just so used to being lied to. I am comfortably numb.
BLS Unleashes Whopping Revisions To 2014 Jobs Data, Now Reports 423K Job Gains In November
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/06/2015 09:06 -0500
As reported first thing this morning, in addition to the jobs and wages numbers, perhaps just as importantly, the BLS would revise its entire 2014 jobs data series, which it did today as it noted:
Establishment survey data have been revised as a result of the annual benchmarking process and the updating of seasonal adjustment factors. Also, household survey data for January 2015 reflect updated population estimates. See the notes at the end ot this news release for more information about these changes.
It wasn’t kidding: remember that January of 2014 jobs print of 144K which was supposedly “horrible” and was blamed entirely on the snow, and was in fact used by the Fed in its decision-making process. Well, guess what: it was BS, and – following the BLS’s revisions – actually turned out to be a whopping 247K.
It gets better: remember that whopping 353K jobs number in November? Well, following the data revision, it was boosted by 20% to a whopping 423K – the second biggest monthly jobs increase in the 21st century!
And breaking it more fully down, what was supposed to be a total gain of 2,952K jobs in 2014 has now been revised to 3,197K.
As it turns out, and as had been expected, the BLS has decided to ignore all those reports of thousands workers laid off in the energy space and mask it all with seasonal adjustment.
And the best news of the day: that average weekly wage you thought you were collecting during all months of 2014? That too was just revised higher across the board.
Did The BLS Forget To Count Thousands Of Energy Job Losses?
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/06/2015 09:52 -0500
One of the convenient things about the sharp plunge in crude and its subsequent and acute impact on energy company staffing levels, is that due to its concentrated nature one can keep track of precisely how many layoffs corporations in the energy sector announced in January. And as Bloomberg helpfully tracks, there were at least (and surely many more that were not unaccounted for) 18,000 terminations by US companies in the high-paying energy sector (and thousands more by foreign companies who have laid of US workers which are not shown in this total).
According to third-party tracker Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number is roughly the same with 21,322 job cuts in January in the energy space attributed to the tumble in oil prices. Texas alone accounted for 19,833 of these layoffs.
“We may see oil-related job cuts extend well beyond those industries involved with exploration and extraction,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of the outplacement firm. He warned the retail, construction and entertainment sectors in regions that have benefited from the oil boom could face challenges.
The BLS report? Well, according to the January payrolls report, the number of Oil and Gas Extraction workers declined to 199.5K in January from 201.4K in December, a virtually non-exstant drop of 1,900 workers (and even the not seasonally adjusted, raw data shows a tiny drop of just 3.1K workers).
Visually, the outlier is as follows:
So our question is: did the BLS choose to ignore these thousands of jobs losses, or did it simply forget?
hmmm
in my state unemployment officially down
but
the actual number of people working is down
WTF???
must be that Common Core math I’ve heard so much about
Heck yeah!!!! I’m on my way to the realtor to buy a house, then to the dealer for a new ride. If there’s time left, might go do some shopping!
Project Chrome, a massive layoff that IBM is pretending is not a massive layoff, is underway. First reported by Robert X. Cringely (a pen name) in Forbes, about 26 percent of the company’s global workforce is being shown the door. At more than 100,000 people, that makes it the largest mass layoffat any U.S. corporation in at least 20 years. Cringely wrote that notices have started going out, and most of the hundred-thousand-plus will likely be gone by the end of February.
IBM immediately denied Cringely’s report, indicating that a planned $600 million “workforce rebalancing” was going to involve layoffs (or what the company calls “Resource Actions”) of just thousands of people. But Cringely responded that he never said that the workforce reductions would be all called layoffs—instead, multiple tactics are being used, including pushing employees out through low ratings (more on that in a moment). And some managers are indeed admitting to employees that their job has been eliminated as part of Project Chrome, leading employees to coin a new catchphrase: “Getting Chromed.”
The news is coming in from around the world, and is affecting folks in sales, support, engineering—just about every job description. The only IBM’ers spared are those working in semiconductor manufacturing, an operation that is in the process of being acquired by Global Foundries.
Alliance@IBM, the IBM employees’ union, says it has so far collected reports of 5000 jobs eliminated, including 250 in Boulder, Colo., 150 in Columbia, Missouri, and 202 in Dubuque, Iowa. Layoffs in Littleton, Mass., are reportedly “massive,” but no specific numbers have been published. Pink slips have been said to be flying at IBM Australia, with rumors of 400 workers to be cut. And the Economic Times in India reported last week that employees of IBM’s offices in Bengaluru were scrambling to find new jobs, trying to get out of IBM ahead of the coming tsunami.
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The fascinating stream of comments is available here. http://www.endicottalliance.org/jobcutsreports.php