Is Today’s Jobs Report Good or Bad??

Today’s jobs report is not as easy as “more jobs added than analysts expected” or “the unemployment rate rose to 8.3%.”

You really need to dig into the report. It is complex and doesn’t fit well on a bumper sticker. What you need to look at is long-term trends and not necessarily a monthly snapshot.

The blog ZeroHedge.com is a great resource for normal folks to understand economic issues. And I strongly urge you to read two articles there today.

First – ‘Seasonal And Birth Death Adjustments Add 429,000 Statistical “Jobs”‘. It is probably the most important “deep dive” on the jobs numbers you could read today.

Happy by the headline establishment survey print of 133,245 which says that the US “added” 163,000 jobs in July from 133,082 last month? Consider this: the number was based on a non seasonally adjusted July number of 132,868. This was a 1.248 million drop from the June print. So how did the smoothing work out to make a real plunge into an “adjusted” rise? Simple: the BLS “added” 377K jobs for seasonal purposes. This was the largest seasonal addition in the past decade for a July NFP print in the past decade, possibly ever…

But please, read the whole thing!

The second article is ‘Full-Time Jobs -197,000; Part-Time Jobs +31,000′. That one is pretty self-explanatory from the headline.

My view? We are in the most sustained, depressed economic conditions in my lifetime and perhaps since the 1930s. We won’t truly appreciate it until after it is over — sometime in the 2020s.

-Bruce