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ANN KENEVAN on February 4, 2024

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ANN KENEVAN

DEMOCRATS ARE COUNTING ON US BEING JUST THAT STUPID? Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Recent History Stress by Hennie Stander is licensed under unsplash.com ... View MoreDEMOCRATS ARE COUNTING ON US BEING JUST THAT STUPID? Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Recent History Stress by Hennie Stander is licensed under unsplash.com On the surface, it was an blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in January the US unexpectedly added 353K "jobs" - the most since January 2023 (when the print was 482K compared to 131K) , double the consensus forecast of 185K and more than the highest Wall Street estimate (300K from Natixis). In fact, this was a 4-sigma beat to estimate, unheard of in the past year. The headline data was stellar across the board, starting with the unemployment rate which once again failed to rise - denying expectations from "Sahm's Rule" that a recession may have already started - all the way to average hourly earnings, which unexpectedly spiked from 4.1% (pre-revision) to 4.5%, the highest since last September, and a slap in the face to the Fed's disinflation narrative... ... or it would be if one didn't think of checking how the average rose: well, it turns out that, since average hourly earnings is a fraction, it did not rise due to a jump in actual wages but - since it is earnings over a period of time - "rose" because the BLS decided to sharply slash the number of estimated hours that everyone was working, from 34.3 to just 34.1, which may not sound like a lot until one realizes that the last time the workweek was this low was when the economy was shut down during covid. Excluding the covid lockdowns, one would have to go back to 2010 to find a workweek that was this anemic. And speaking of revisions, we had a lot of those: in January, the BLS conducted its annual "annual re-benchmarking and update of seasonal adjustment factors." Long story short, what was until December a decline in jobs has now been miraculously transformed into gains, as shown in the chart below. https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/inside-most-ridiculous-jobs-report-recent-history

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Recent History www.zerohedge.com

February 4, 2024