Labor

While too backward looking to be actionable (it reflects the labor situation with a 2 month delay) especially in a time when everyone is focused on the future of Trump's fiscal policies (whose details have still to be revealed), today's JOLTs report showed few changes for "Janet Yellen's favorite labor market indicator": the number of job openings was little changed at 5.501 million, down from downward revised 5.505 million, missing expectations for a second consecutive month: consensus was looking for 5.568 million jobs.

Businesses in China have reported seeing a 250% increase in productivity after replacing over 90% of the workforce with robots.  Following a factory in Dongguan replacing nearly all of its human workforce with robots, politicians in China are now looking seriously at the prospect of replacing human workers with robots across the country. Zmescience.com reports: While some of the world’s leaders are obsessed with keeping people out of their country, an unspoken entity is slowly but certainly taking our jobs: robots.

Just last week, Americans were reassured (twice) that everything is awesome in the US labor market as ADP and BLS data showed jobs-jobs-jobs everywhere. However, along with wage stagnation (and a rising unemployment rate), there is a bigger problem, as Deutsche Bank warns, aside from soft earnings, hiring at America’s biggest companies is slowing down for the first time since 2010.

No Rate Hike for You

Here's Chris Barraud's quick analysis of the Unemployment numbers this morning. He is one of the people that MarketSlant follows closely

#US (7) | The unemployment rate, unrounded, ? to 4.780% (vs 4.716% prior) because of a ? in the participation rate (62.9% vs 62.7% prior)

— Christophe Barraud (@C_Barraud) February 3, 2017

Here are the rest of his comments on the report as tweeted:

Following today's jobs report, the market's reaction to the unexpectedly strong January payrolls visualized in the charts below, is straightforward: the disappointing wage growth is an indication that the Fed may not hike rates for quite a bit longer than expected, and will likely will be forced to reduce its rate hike expectations from 3 to 2 (in line with the market) or fewer if wage growth continue to stagnate.