NFP: 88k (and I don't believe even that)

The Payroll numbers are out, and they are not particularly pretty:

88,000 new jobs were created in April, according to BLS. This is the weakest job gain since November '04. Cumulative revisions for prior months were to the downside by 26,000.

As expected, losses were in Manufacturing (19k), Retail (26k) and Construction (11k). The weakness in Construction has been very uted, implying that the full impact of the housing slow down has yet to be fully realized.

Biggest gains were had in Services (116k), Education and Health (53k), Gov't (25k) Professional (24k) and Leisure/Hospitality (22k).



Temporary help jobs fell for a 3rd month (January was flat) making 4 consecutive months of no gains. Temp help tends to lead employment gains, and this weakness can be read as a future forecastor of employment.

We don't pay close attention to the Household survey, (the self reported number is very volatile) but the drop of -468k was an eyebrow raiser.

~~~

Birth Death Adjustment : A whopping 317k B/D adjustment -- that is the single largest "adjustment" on record for any single given month. And despite that giant add, the number was a very soft 88k.

To put this into some context, of those 317k new jobs hypothesized by BLS, 49k of those supposed jobs are in construction. Now what are the odds of that?



While Wall Street celebrates the upcoming recession, let me remind you that this economy requires about 150k new monthly jobs to merely keeep up with population growth.

Friday, May 04, 2007 | 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBack (2)

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Comments

by the way cnbc reports you would think that we were all on oprah and about to get a new new grand prix!

this american experiment is the biggest sale in the history of the world.

Posted by: erik | May 4, 2007 9:58:38 AM