Labor

Authored by former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner viaThe Hill.com,

My grandmother used to say, “You can put truth in the river five days after a lie; truth is gone catch up.”

Well, here’s the truth: The working men and women of this country are working more jobs and more hours, and they’re still barely hanging on. Beneath those fingertips, they can feel that middle-class dream – the American dream – slipping right away from them. It’s time for President Trump to do something about it.

It appears that the "animal spirits" unleashed by President Trump are not contained to the stock market: according to the BLS, one of the most notable observations to emerge from the February (and January) jobs reports is that the number of Americans no longer in the labor force plunged since December, declining by 736,000 in January (to a modest extent due to a data revision) and a further 176,000 in February.  The combined two-month addition of 912,000 was the biggest drop in the "not in labor force" series on record.

The US economy added 235,000 jobs in February, beating upward revised expectations of 200K, in-line with whisper expctations of 233K. Last month's report was upward revised from 227K to 238K with the net addition for the past two months coming to +9K.

Nonfarm private payrolls rose 227k up from 221k prior and above the estimate of 215k. Manufacturing payrolls rose 28k after rising 11k in the prior month; this also beat the +10k consensus estimate.

Following Wednesday's blowout ADP report, which printed some 40K jobs higher than the highest estimate, the only possibility for tomorrow's nonfarm payroll report, the last major economic data point before the Fed's March 15th rate hike announcement, is to disappoint, especially in terms of wages (which in light of the recent downward revision of Q1 GDP by the Atlanta Fed to 1.2% is not out of the question). That possibility, however, is slim to none if one looks at Wall Street's forecasts, where virtually every sellside analyst boosted their NFP estimate in the hours after the ADP number.

Job creation has been a key focus of the Trump administration which has blamed outsourcing to lower cost countries like Mexico and China for the stagnant wages of the middle-class working folks of America's Midwest.