Labor

Employment Lies

Paul Craig Roberts

June 3, 2016. Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the US economy only created 38,000 new jobs in May and revised down by 59,000 jobs the previously reported gains in March and April.

Yet the BLS reported that the unemployment rate fell from 5.0 to 4.7 percent, a figure generally regarded as full employment.

The May jobs increase only covers a small fraction of the monthly growth in the labor force and, therefore, cannot account for the drop in unemployment.

By EconMatters

Bonds, Stocks, Credit and Risk are all mispriced right now in Fed and Central Bank enabled financial markets - you can just see the money managers begging for the Fed not to hike rates on their enabled asses. A 4.7% unemployment rate and the Fed still cannot hike rates - 8 years is a complete business cycle folks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuoP6dJhqE4

Submitted by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

A report from Pew Research Center reveals that between the third quarter of 2000 and the same period of last year, wages across the U.S. rose by 7.4 percent in real terms, driven largely by the oil and gas industry.

Wages in energy-dependent communities rose by the most, in some cases more than twofold, such as in Texas. This shouldn’t be surprising as the period reviewed coincides with the peak of the shale boom in the country, even though it also covers two periods of recession.

Ever since WalMart decided to increase its minimum wage and then give all employees a 2% pay raise, it has been forced to slash guidance and move forward with mass layoffs in order to cut costs (it had to offset the multi-billion dollar short-term PR investment somehow). The next phase of the cost cutting efforts will now be to replace workers with drones.

When Obama made another TV appearance earlier this week, taking credit for the Fed's reflation of the stock market as somehow indicative of an economic "recovery" ("fiction peddlers" not allowed in the crowd), he once ignore the underlying "facts" behind said recovery: here is another way of showing the unprecedented transformation in the US labor pool: since December 2014, the US has added 455,000 waiters and bartenders, while losing 10,000 manufacturing workers.

Behold: "Obama's recovery."