booming – The Burning Platform

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?

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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.