Friday, June 3, 2011

Jobs: Plus 54,000

Nonfarm payroll employment changed little (+54,000) in May, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains continued in professional and business services, healthcare, and mining. Employment levels in other major private-sector industries were little changed, and local government employment continued to decline.

Among the marginally attached, there were 822,000 discouraged workers in May, a decrease of 261,000 from a year earlier. Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.

Overall, the number out today mirrors the erratic money supply growth numbers of recent months. Spurts of strong money supply growth, followed by slowdowns in money growth, mirror the up and down trends in economic activity.

It is not surprising that healthcare jobs are increasing given government's focus in micro-manipulating that sector of the economy. Nor is it surprising that the mining sector is strong, given that the result of the money printing will be more price inflation.

Government at the state and local level continues to experience layoffs because of the overall debt burdens by many of these governments, coupled with down trending tax revenues as a result of the Fed induced shifting and volatile economy.

UPDATE A trader emails:
Oddly, much can be solved with just one more unemployed​: Bernanke

3 comments:

  1. Mr. Wenzel, don't forget that the Birth/Death adjustment added 206,000 for may. So, it is even worse than it appears.

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  2. Basically outside of seasonal (Christmas shopping mainly), temporary stimulus and census work, over the past two years as far as I can tell we've had no significant job growth and in fact we've lost many more jobs in the private sector than we're likely to ever get back. Businesses have identified the fat, have trimmed or are trimming it and will not return to pre-crisis payrolls now that they are conditioned to do more with less. Anyone can fudge the numbers to make things appear rosy at a glance, but as costs go up businesses will find ways of remaining profitable at the expense of their customers and employees.

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  3. Boy, Krugman is going to look stupid in July.

    http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2011/03/paul-krugman-fish-floating-in-jello.html

    ReplyDelete