Via ConvergEx's Nick Colas,
Today we offer up five market counterfactuals – “What ifs” – to both illustrate why large cap U.S. equities just closed near their highest levels of 2016 and consider the conventional wisdom about whether the current rally is sustainable.
Our home base: where asset prices and other trends started the year.
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.
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.
Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
“Clinton to Paint Trump as a Risk to World Order.”
Thus did page one of Thursday’s New York Times tee up Hillary Clinton’s big San Diego speech on foreign policy.
Inside the Times, the headline was edited to underline the point:
“Clinton to Portray Trump as Risk to the World.”
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."