Labor

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.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

After April and June's disappointment, ADP reports the US economy added 178k jobs in July (less than the 190k expectation and below June's upwardly revised 191k). This is somewhat in line with the 180k expectation for NFP on Friday.

Two months in a row, ADP has weakened as ISM surveys suggested employment is rolling over.

Once again Service-providing jobs dominated (+174k vs +4k for goods) with manufacturing losing 4,000 jobs in July.

In April, the Fed's otherwise boring Beige Book revealed a striking anecdote about the current state of the US labor market: as the Boston Fed commented at the time, the qualified labor shortage had gotten so bad, that the hit rate on hiring after a simple math and drug test, has collapsed below 50%. To wit: