Well folks, headlines everywhere calling the September jobs employment report dismal and it’s showing people don’t want to work, gloom and doom, all because the topline number was 300,000 below consensus expectations. So I’m reading and seeing dismal gloom and doom, people don’t want to work, the government doesn’t want them to work, etc. etc.
I hate to say it, but I have a totally different take. It may not be politically correct from a conservative viewpoint, but actually, I’m going to say, it was a solid jobs report. that’s right, may not have been the best in history, but it was pretty strong.
The key point here, overlooked by so many people, and I don’t know why: private-sector jobs rose 317,000. Remember private sector jobs? they’re the most important jobs, and upward revisions to private jobs in July and august came to over 100,000.
And actually, private jobs rising about 414,000 with revisions were just about on target with the consensus estimates.
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And that’s why, by the way, why the stock market didn’t react very much. Last I looked, it was down just a smidge. Now, it was government jobs and especially government school jobs that crashed in this report.
This has to do with crazy seasonal adjustment problems, which can’t keep up with various pandemic-related school closings and openings around the country.
But I’m interested always in free enterprise capitalism which is much better than big government socialism, and one way to track free enterprise capitalism is private employment, which is doing pretty well thank you very much, and it showed up in today’s report. Sometimes, you have to be empirical and objective, not political, in your economic analysis. And I’m sorry that so many commentators were not.
And, there’s other good stuff in this report, besides private jobs. For example, household employment, which is mainly driven by small businesses, and that is where the unemployment rate derives, was up 526,000. that’s a big number.
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And because of that, the unemployment rate declined again from 5.2% to 4.8%. That’s very important. And the so-called underemployment rate called U-6 and covers even more ground dropped from 8.8 to 8.5%. And the employment to population ratio edged up from 58.5 to 58.7%.
Now that’s still too low, but a year ago it was only 56.6%. So it’s moving in the right direction. It’s not fab, but good.
And here’s some more: wages, as measured by average hourly earnings, jumped .6%, that’s up 4.6% for the last 12 months. Meanwhile, aggregate hours worked up .8% – a big number, and up 4.7% for the year.
Read More: Larry Kudlow: The jobs report was better than people are saying