Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 467,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 4.0 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment growth continued in leisure and hospitality, in professional and business services, in retail trade, and in transportation and warehousing.
So much for ADP, eh?
There are several serious things of note in this report. First is that as I've explained before, January is revision month for the top-line data counts in several household tables, the most important of which is the non-institutional population.
This month's revision erased the entire trend I'd been noting since the middle of the year. It's just..... gone.
Second, the internals are all normal on this report for a January but the firing number was much lower than normal. Usually in January you see a -1m print on the unadjusted number, sometimes as high as -1.5m. Why? Seasonal help that gets let go. That's completely expected since there's this sort of holiday in December, you know, which comes quite-reliably after the sample week and thus is in the January numbers.
This year it was -114k, which is much stronger than usual.
The unemployment rate was up a tick. By the "base data" we're ~2.5 million from the pre-pandemic employed number, but do remember that this doesn't adjust for population increase. When you do that we're not missing 2.5 million people from the employed list, its roughly 5 million.
Employment:population ratio is at 59.1%; for comparison in 2020-02 it was 60.9%.
One oddity is that the 25-34 age cohort lost jobs. That's....unusual. It was the only age cohort that did, as did the less than high school educated. One has to wonder: Given that correlation is this a "missing generation" of people in terms of education? That has some interesting implications down the road, none of them good.
Were I Jerome Powell I'd issue an emergency 50bps rate hike right now, along with an immediate order to shut off all asset purchases and roll-overs. He won't do it, but he damn well should because if this data is real The Fed is going to be taking very harsh and very rapid steps.
They have to act forcefully and immediately -- unless, of course, they have information that shows this is a pure Biden-driven "knob-twisting" pack of lies.