Friday we saw a great jobs number but… were the knock-it-out-of the ballpark num
I spoke with Matt Ray yesterday on America’s Morning news about the jobs report and how I thought the data could be misleading. You can listen to our chat by clicking here. Today, after seeing the NFIB report, I decided the topic deserved a thorough analysis, so I’ve added a lot here to what we discussed.
To start with, this number can be quite volatile, so if we look at a three-month rolling average, the current gain is still 26,000 less than the average during the first six months of the year. We did like to see a 0.4% rise in average hourly earnings last month, bringing the annual rate up to 2.5%, which is the strongest in the past six years. That bodes well for holiday spending, which ought to have companies like Amazon pleased as punch. If we look at the labor-force participation rate however, that remained unchanged at 62.4%, which is 0.5 lower than in January. This data point is one that causes yours truly much angst. Think of this as a measure of what percentage of the population is rowing the economic row boat. The more that row, the faster we can go. Today we have roughly the same portion we had in the late 1970s, not exactly a robust growth period for the nation!
http://elleseconomy.com/2015/11/10/great-jobs-number-but/
