The mood before this morning’s jobs report landed with a thud was one of high, almost touching optimism. For example, there was this from Matt Phillips at Quartz:
All indications are that this Friday’s US jobs report for August is going to be a very, very big one.
Phillips cited:
Ted Wieseman, an economic analyst at Morgan Stanley, [who] recently wrote that the ongoing strength in jobless claims through August “is quite impressive, enough so for us to marginally nudge up our August payrolls forecast to 250,000 from 240,000.”
Which was wrong, of course, by nearly half. To the downside.
And manufacturing was expected to carry a lot of water with “… ongoing job growth in the cyclical industrial sector, which is watched as proxy for the broader economy,” continuing to “ramp up.”
Instead, as Zero Hedge notes:
Of the 142K jobs created, just under half came from the lowest paying jobs possible: education and health; leisure and hospitality; and temp-help. The best paying jobs, finance and information, added a whopping 4K jobs between them. Finally, about that much delayed US manufacturing renaissance: stick a fork in it – in August the number of manufacturing jobs created was exactly 0.
The monthly guessing games are of interest, certainly. But the larger and continuing employment story might be better understood by focusing these two depressing facts:
* Fewer Americans are now employed than when George W. Bush was in office.
* Labor force participation is at a 36-year low.
