Karl Denninger
July 3, 2014
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229154
The Bureau of Lies And Scams emitted it's usual monthly fiction today:
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 288,000 in June, and the unemployment rate declined to 6.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains were widespread, led by employment growth in professional and business services, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and health care.
Uh huh.
Here's the amusing part -- adjusted for population on a 12 month basis the net change was..... 1,000. Really.
In other words, take the 12 month change in employment and subtract the 12 month change in working-age population. You get.... "1", and since these are thousands, that's 1,000 people.
We had a positive print here in March, but this tells the tale in terms of people; it's flat.
Let's look at the charts.
The gain rate looks good top-line. The problem is that population-corrected it's flat:
There is one good piece of news in here -- the employment:population rate edged up. A breakout it is not -- yet -- but the trend is in the right direction at the moment:
The workweek was unchanged, indicating little pressure there, and has remained at 34.5 for the last year. Unfortunately a huge percentage of the added jobs were low-wage; +33,000 in food-service and drinking places alone. The sad part of people cheering professional and business service gains is that a minority of them were in high-paying sectors -- only about 1/3rd of the adds sum between management, technical consulting, architectural and engineer or computer systems design and related services (e.g. programming.) The rest were low-wage "business services" such as temp placements.
The one bright spot among manufacturing is that it was all in durable goods; non-durable manufacturing actually lost 1,000 jobs. That's a positive, but as a percentage of the whole manufacturing was only 5.5% of the added employment. That's terrible.
Also not-good was the increase in involuntary part-time employment ("economic reasons"); the total net-add was ridiculous, accounting for nearly the entire addition to employment at +275,000 this month alone. OUCH.
Non-economic shift to part-time employment was +840,000, which was nearly triple the employment add. What's far more-troubling is that this looks to be a step-function in the last month -- and it's unexplained. Obamacare went into effect on the year turn for most employers; what explains 840,000 people shifting to part-time employment for other than economic reasons (in other words, they got forced back onto part-time hours or could only find a part-time job) in one month?
Finally, 26,000 additional government leeches were added to your tax bill -- ironically, the same as actual goods-producing jobs, canceling their positive economic impact.
Welcome to Amerika, comrade.