Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 142,000 in August, and the unemployment rate changed little at 4.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in construction and health care.
Ah, more people who become sick (we didn't cause that did we?) and then we have to hire 10 people to make sure you pay for every one who fixes your busted-up body when you have a car accident.
The market appeared to be expecting a disaster and didn't get it; what had been a decently-red futures number before the print went positive and as I write this is just above zero.
The unadjusted household number is -690,000, however, which is certainly not a positive print, and what's additive to that is that 1.171 million more people said "screw this!" and started to couch surf (not-in-labor-force.) What's incongruent with that is that all four of the subtables for educational attainment had either flat or positive change, so obviously there is a data discontinuity in there somewhere. Exactly where is tough to suss out, but this is not all that unexpected in the area of turning points -- these are surveys and not exhaustive, so sampling error does occur.
Speaking of which the usual pattern of "errors" in one direction continues with both of the last two months revised downward -- seriously so. May I remind anyone who has had a stats class that errors are normally distributed; if what is reported is abnormally in one direction it is not an "error" but rather either poor data (in which case you can't trust it at all) or deliberate. It doesn't matter which if you're trying to make decisions based on said "data."
Of much more important note is the population-adjusted employment data, which has always been a key metric. Its a lagging indicator and thus useless to predict the future, but trends are still useful to keep an eye on although obviously huge dislocation events (like the pandemic) skew it. We're well out that zone now and it is trending negative, now on 12 months basis being -1.722 million employed having failed to pu tup a positive print since last November, and that only a small and expected result of holiday temporary hiring. Discounting that one-month number its been negative since May of 2023.
A large part of this is demographic and there is no way to solve it with immigration despite what some will try to claim because otherwise the data would have inflected the other way by now in the current administration This is the longer-term consequence of policy decisions going back two decades and continuing on an unbroken basis since irrespective of which party has control of Congress or the White House -- and there is no indication anywhere in the data that it has or will turn. It should not be expected to do so until and unless policy changes.
This report looks to me a lot like good old Wile-E -- you know, the oft-repeated scene in Looney Tunes where there is no gravity for a short while after he runs off the cliff -- until he looks down.