Labor

While the payrolls report (and wage gains) was an unmitigated disaster for anyone seeking "evidence" of an economic rebound (i.e., the Federal Reserve), there was some good news in the Unemployment rate which declined from 4.4% to 4.3%, the lowest going back to 2001.

There is just one problem with the above "silver lining": the unemployment rate declined for all the wrong reasons, because contrary to expectations, the Household Survey reported that the number of employed Americans actually declined by 233K to 152.923 million, the lowest going back to February.

As previewed last night, the jobs "whisper" risk was to the downside, and in what was a very disappointing print released moments ago by the BLS, the whisper was spot on with only 138K jobs added in May, far below the 185K estimate, and below the lowest estimate of 140K. This was the second lowest print going back all the way to last October. Additionally, April's big beat of 211K was revised substantially lower to only 174K, suggesting that any expectation the Fed may have had of "evidence" the recent economic slowdown was transitory was just crushed.

A long list of U.S. jobs are being rendered obsolete by technological advancements and automation. Which workers are most at risk?

You will find more statistics at Statista

After a poor March jobs report, followed by an April scorcher, the May payrolls report due at 8:30am on Friday will be the tiebreaker, not only for the current state of the economy where both soft and hard data have been deteriorating in recent weeks, but perhaps also for the June rate hike decision, which as the Fed noted in its May FOMC minutes, may not take place without "evidence" that the recent "transitory weakness" in the economy is over. Here are the consensus expectations for tomorrow's report:

While Amazon is testing drone delivery, ocean freight, (and teleportation devices, ok we made that up), WalMart has decided to take a different approach to fulfilling its online orders... employees will deliver packages on their way home from work!

As AP reports, in its latest effort to compete with online giant Amazon, Walmart is testing a delivery service using its own store employees, who will deliver packages ordered online while driving home from their regular work shifts.