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Not Bad. Not Good Either.
Mostly inoffensive.
That's as good a two-word description of Friday's US jobs report as you'll find.
For all the frenzied buildup, the 151,000 headline was remarkable mostly for being bang-on consensus. Economists were looking for 155,000. The range, from 79 of those criminally overpaid folks, was 30,000 to 300,000.
December's robust readout was revised still stronger, while January's underwhelming headline was adjusted still weaker. With those revisions and February's headline, the three-m
Criminally overpaid, love it.
Private payrolls rose 140,000, while the federal government shed 10,000 jobs. I’m sure that juxtaposition will be trotted out as evidence that it’s “all going according to Elon’s plan” by a lot of Wall Street MAGAcolytes. Trump convinced his MAGA morons that the FBI was evil, Trump convinced his MAGA idiots that trans folks were a threat. Trump convinced his brain-dead sycophants that Putin is a genius, Trump convinced his stupid sheep that he’s the greatest hero yet. Trump’s mouth-breathers were convinced that climate change was all made up, Trump convinced his knuckle-dragging rubes that he cares for them at all. Trump convinced his blank-eyed zombies he has won every election, Trump convinced his cretin cattle to riot at his beck and call. Trump convinced his brainless chickens they should never use their head, Trump convinced his Proud Boy haters by him they won’t be misled. Trump convinced his fascist followers he’s the new Messiah come, Trump’s successful with those people who are proud of being dumb. Clearly Trump’s support is broadly based, boasting idiots of every stripe. They’re the greatest threat we’ve ever faced, Gotta say, they’re really not my type.
Well said….
The best part is that if you ask Wall Street how they know all of this is in the service of helping Main Street and restoring the American economy to some bygone state of “greatness,” they say “Because Scott Bessent said so!” What happened to healthy skepticism?
I was talking about this with someone the other day: Perhaps the biggest irony of the Trump era is the extent to which his presidencies are flagrant, out-in-the-open examples of everything his supporters — sane, insane and everywhere in-between — accuse the “deep-state” “establishment” of doing.
I mean, Jesus Christ, here’s a guy who signed an executive order the other day which effectively legalizes foreign bribery, who established a personal crypto coin which could be (and surely is) a vehicle for influence-buying, whose penchant for nepotism knows no bounds, who installed a heroin addict as health czar, who let the unelected, foreign-born richest person on Earth commandeer Congress’s spending power (i.e., the people’s purse), who put a gay Soros understudy in charge of the US Treasury (which makes no difference to me, but which in theory, the American right should be absolutely aghast at) and who’s himself a living, breathing conspiracy. And I could go on and on and on.
Pick a thread from an unhinged right-winger’s Youtube channel or basement bunker podcast/broadcast, and that’s Trump.
Don’t forget one of the biggest hypocrisies: talking about merit while inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars and having all the connections in the world to get his “career” started and still somehow almost going bankrupt until he got a show pretending to be a successful businessman!
With respect, all this is just statistics — the bell-shaped curve. There are 335,000,000 people in the US. With all due respect, remember, 165,000,000 of our fellow citizens are of below average intelligence. It’s just statistics. It will never change.
Econ data is backwards looking and much is coincident. If this is an inflection the bulk of data will miss it. Need to i) look at leading data, ii) look at momentum, iii) anticipate future directional move.
On the Federal Govt payrolls, the survey window for NFP also came before most of the layoffs in February. March’s figures or Feb’s revised numbers might show a bigger dent than the 10K… all this to say thing might be going less according to plan next month.