Against expectations of a 18.0 print, February's Philly Fed exploded higher to 43.3 - the highest since January 1984. This is a 10-standard-deviation beat, led by a surge in new orders and the workweek, despite a decline in 'hope' and the number of employees.
Everything is Awesome America... especially in Philapdelphia?
For context, that is a 10-sigma event...
But 'hope' declined...
For 60 years the labor force participation rate of 25-54 year old men in America has declined. There are many reasons for this existential decline, but Philly Federal Reserve President Pat Harker explained today during a Q&A session that he is concerned that more 25-54 year old men are out of the workforce and blamed "drug abuse" for the problem.
Queen Elizabeth is offering £30,000 per year to anybody who can run her official Twitter account, according to a job posted by Buckingham Palace. According to the advertisement placed on the Queen’s official website, the royal household would like to employ a new “digital communications officer” to join the team and regularly send tweets out to the Queen’s 2.77 million followers.
Ever since the gold report was published, the gold price moved up. This caught several investors by surprise, as some of them even continued to dump gold, scared by what appeared to be a good jobs report.
‘Appeared to be’, because?
Yes, 227,000 new jobs were created, and we can’t deny that’s a positive evolution. However, the increased job number is also the only positive thing in the jobs report, and there are two other issues that haven’t really been highlighted.
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via PeakProsperity.com,
In the modern era, the phrase Class War is rooted in the socialist/Marxist concept that the conflict between labor (the working class) and capital (owners of capital) is not just inevitable - it’s the fulcrum of history. In this view, this Class War is the inevitable result of the asymmetry between the elite who own/control the capital and the much larger class of people whose livelihood is earned solely by their labor.