A Nonfarm Payroll Beat Today the labor department released the November jobs report - Nonfarm Payroll - of course Wall Street always highly anticipates this number; all the politicians, Donald Trump was ready to tweet as soon as the data was released. The expectation was for 190,000 jobs and we beat, with 228,000 jobs. An Even Bigger Hoax The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%, which prompted President Trump to tweet, "The unemployment rate remains at a 17-year low of 4.1%. Now remember, when Trump is running for office he called 5% unemployment "The biggest hoax in American history", claiming that the rate was really 30, 40, 50%. Well if 5% was the biggest hoax in American history, what's 4.1?%? It's an even bigger hoax. Disappointing Numbers So THIS is the biggest hoax in American history, except that the difference is now Trump is the purveyor of that hoax. He is no longer calling it out, he is now participating in the same hoax that he criticized in order to get elected. The numbers that missed were the average hourly earnings, which, again, everybody keeps talking about how earnings are going to go up; they were looking for a .3% increase in average hourly earnings following flat earnings the previous month. Not only did they not get .3%, they got +.2%, but they revised last month's 0% to -.1%. So really, very disappointing numbers on the wages. Labor Force Participation Labor Force Participation rate held steady at 62.7%; that's near the lowest it has been in this cycle. And again, if you look at where the jobs were, we did manage to create 31,000 manufacturing jobs. We have had a boost in manufacturing jobs, despite the fact that we are not seeing it in the trade balance, because we have the worst trade deficit in five years, so I don't really know what everybody's manufacturing, if we're not exporting it, or if it is not reducing our imports.
via IFTTT