Oh boy the screamers are all over themselves saying this is a "good report."

Of course they didn't read anything except the headline establishment survey.

I did.

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 156,000 in August, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 4.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in manufacturing, construction, professional and technical services, health care, and mining.

Suuuuureeeee we did.  With so-called "adjustment", that is.

Note that the monthly number is negative.  Not slightly either -- by 894,000 people!

Yes, unadjusted we lost almost 900,000 jobs.  Now to be fair August is usually a firing month.  But this is still an outlier; the last several years have been -633, -494 and -618, respectively. Even "better" the "not-in-labor-force" number went up big too, which is why the "formal" unemployment rate only ticked up one.

More-troubling the employment:population rate lost four ticks, erasing basically the entire gain since March.

I remind you that there is zero Harvey impact in here as the survey was complete before the storm.

Let's look inside.

On the parasite side "health care" continues to gain jobs; 20,000 this month.  Again, 90% of them never provide a single second of care to a person; they are flat overhead and you pay for it.  This has to stop and in fact reverse but you know why policy won't allow it -- it would instantly screw the employment numbers and cause a recession, so the fact that bridge is out be damned, full speed ahead!

Booze and food flattened; I guess there's a limit to what people can pay to get drunk.

There was trouble in paradise with hours worked too -- it ticked down by 0.1 for all payrolls, and 0.2 for manufacturing.  Those are bad.

Looking inside the data tables the expected job losses in teens (4 ticks) occurred; this is normal seasonal behavior.  But here's a table you do not want to see:

The only people making progress in employment are those with less than a high school diploma.  Everyone else saw their unemployment rates go up or were flat.

This is the reality of our so-called "strong employment" economy folks, and it has been this way since the 2008 recession.  I keep calling it out because it's a flat-out disaster; yes, there have been job gains for educated people but the fact is that when people talk about how "wonderful" the jobs report is they are intentionally ignoring these statistics and making claims that simply do not hold up about our economy being "strong."

Oh by the way, if that's not enough average weekly earnings were down, all due to fewer hours worked.  Average hourly earnings did tick up -- by three cents.

Strong job market my ass.