
July’s ‘Great’ US Jobs Report Hid Grim Milestone
Donald Trump's go-it-alone approach to virus relief met with mixed reviews on Sunday and Monday.
Most of those involved seem to realize the executive orders issued over the weekend are legally dubious, but there's also a sense in which they were necessary to avert a rapid deterioration in market sentiment.
The problem, of course, is that stocks and corporate credit aren't what needs help. As Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin put it last week, "markets are working fine right now". So "fine", in
Another hidden weakness in the report is the decline in the survey response data. As businesses in the survey list close permanently, the firms stop reporting their data. We no longer see their non-working employees as unemployed when there is no survey response showing their absence. A lot of critical data is now missing, especially as relates to small firms.
And you certainly won’t see any effort by the current administration to clarify the data.