Labor

And now the dovish Fed has another problem: the BLS reports that in July the US added 209K jobs, beating consensus expectations of a 180K print, while June was revised higher to 231K from 222K, even as May was revised modestly lower from 152K to 145K, for a net gain of +2,000 in the prior two months.

Nonfarm private payrolls rose 205k vs last month's 194k, and above the estimate of 180k, as the drop from durable manufacturing failed to materialize. In a familiar refrain, bars and restaurants hired the most workers of any sector in July.

At 8:30am on Friday, the BLS is expected to announce that in July the US created 180K jobs, down from 222K in June though still in line with the 6-month average of 180K, with the biggest downside risk a slowdown in durable manufacturing payrolls as auto production slumped.

Sellside expectations:

Via StockBoardAsset.com,

On Wednesday, the US added 178k private sector jobs in July, verse 185k jobs expected. The number was just shy of Wall Street estimates, and did not stop the mainstream media and Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi from saying, “the American job machine continues to operate in high gear.”

We've frequently argued that public pension funds in the U.S. are nothing more than thinly-veiled ponzi schemes with their ridiculously high return assumptions specifically intended to artificially minimize the present value of future retiree payment obligations and thus also minimize required annual contributions from taxpayers...all while actual, if immediately intangible, underfunded liabilities continue to surge. 

Today was Amazon Jobs Day, which the company said was "its biggest hiring event of the year" in which it would interview and hire 50,000 full-time and part-time employees in communities all around the country, mostly for vacant warehouse worker positions. The jobs fair is part of Amazon's pledge to hire 130,000 workers by 2018.