It Was a “Wow! Wow!” Bow-Wow Dog of a Doozy Week for Jobs!

Does anyone remember way back to when new jobs came in so bad the report shocked everyone by being far below expectations? Stretch your memory because it was all of three days ago that only 106,000 new jobs were created, well below the 190,000 Dow Jones estimate, and even further below the previous month’s upwardly revised 253,000. Yet, now, they’ve exploded to half a million! Problem’s solved. No need to read on economics anymore.

Naturally, the original cavernous number didn’t phase stock investors because what could be better for investors than to know their businesses were plunging into the abyss of a recession? Right? Isn’t that what everyone who owns part of a business wants to hear? Apparently, it was, because they shrugged the report off without a blink. That’s because, at the same time, what could be better for investors than to know the Fed would stop sucking the float of money out of the economy since almost none of them are buying ownership in a business but just buying chips in a casino that needs abundant cash to keep the play going?

So, the plunge in jobs set the table for Jerome Powell, Father Fed, to deliver a seismic jolt later in the day with mere hints that the Fed’s inflation battle might possibly be going better than he thinks it is. (More on that in another article.) After all, what could be better than the head of the Fed telling you the entire Fed might be wrong about needing to tighten further? So, rather than bet on Powell’s string of hawkish statements in his speech about needing to keep fighting inflation longer by tamping the economy down further, why not bet, based on that the miserable job report, that he was as wrong as he merely hinted he might in the Q&A afterward? Why not bet that, at last, Powell’s knees were buckling, and the phantasm known as the Fed pivot would soon be here?

All was not as it seemed, however, though how it seemed was not, in itself, the least bit clear: As covered in The Daily Doom, “US Job Opening Far Lower Than Reported by Department Of Labor.”

Sure, new job positions came in WAY below expectations, but that got blamed on the weather. (I doubted it, and so did Zero Hedge.) Only half a day ahead of the report, ZH prepared the way for what was to come with an article stating that the number of apparent mistakes and contradictions born of incompetence or lies in various government jobs reports last year (it being an act of generosity to call them “mistakes”) has been so outrageous as to defy belief, making malarky out of Biden’s baloney:

Biden’s labor department is a study in contrasts (and pats on shoulders). One day we get a contraction in PMI employment (both manufacturing and services), the other we get a major beat in employment. Then, one day the Household survey shows a plunge in employment(in fact, there has almost been no employment gain in the past 9 months) and a record in multiple jobholders and part-time workers, and the same day the Establishment Survey signals a spike in payrolls (mostly among waiters and bartenders). Or the day the JOLTS report shows an unexpected jump in job openings even as actual hiring slides to a two year low. Or the straw the breaks the latest trend in the labor market’s back, is when the jobs report finally cracks and shows the fewest jobs added in over a year, and yet initial jobless claims tumble and reverse all recent increases despite daily news of mass layoffs across all tech companies, as the relentless barrage of conflicting data out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which is the principal “fact-finding” agency for the Biden Administration and a core pillar of the Dept of Labor) just won’t stop, almost as if to make a very political point.

But while one can certainly appreciate Biden’s desire to paint the glass of US jobs as always half full, reality is starting to make a mockery of the president’s gaslighting ambitions, as one by one core pillars of the administration’s “strong jobs” fabulation collapse. First it was the Philadelphia Fed shockingly stating that contrary to the BLS “goalseeking” of 1.1 million jobs in Q2 2022, the US actually only added a paltry 10,000 jobs (just as the Fed unleashed an unprecedented spree of 75bps rate hikes)……..more here

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