Take a look at what Karl Denniger has on his site. I can only grab the text so hit the link..:)
ops…
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 151,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 4.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in several industries, led by retail trade, food services and drinking places, health care, and manufacturing. Employment declined in private educational services, transportation and warehousing, and mining.
Well, that’s not very interesting…. let’s look at the big chart that matters (employment:population ratio):
And yet the mainslime lying media is quoting the participation rate from the adjusted numbers and claiming that it improved. It did not; it was down 4 ticks to 59.0.
Now to be fair, last year, same month, it was also down four ticks. It’s called “seasonal firing” in January, and it happens every year. This year the household numbers say that while the population went up about 461,000 people the number of people actually employed went down by 666,000.
Yes, you read that right — negative 666,000.
Oh, and the unadjusted unemployment rate was up from 4.8% last month to 5.3% — a huge jump.
Who got screwed the worst? Women and teens; teens saw their unemployment rate fly higher by 2.3% (!) from 14.2 -> 16.5%.
But, this is expected in January as seasonal employees are fired.
There’s another problem here in the data though….. that’s found here:
What? There were 2.99 million jobs reported lost in the establishment survey with over 2 million of those in services. In other words the “gain” was due to “seasonal adjustment” and it was utterly monstrous; if reported on the establishment survey without same it would have been a ruinously bad print.
Is there any good news in here? Yes; average weekly hours is up a tenth to 34.6, all in services — in goods-producing jobs the workweek was down a tenth. And hourly wages were up materially (12 cents/hour), after being flat last month. I suspect most of this was minimum-wage increase laws that took effect in January although the dispersion was pretty even, which would not be expected if that was the cause (you’d expect most of it in hospitality, for example.)
As they say….. interesting….