August 5, 2016 - The Jobs Report that came out today is a product of pure fiction. I listen to the business news every day and it is extremely rare when anything on the business news is positive. First of all, you must forget about the Las Vegas results for Wall Street - the stock market is completely disconnected from the real market (the market that you and I live in every day).
Day after day, you will hear of company layoffs, retail chain closings, restaurant activity slowing, etc. The other day the only news of anything positive was that Linked-In subscriptions had gone up. The reason these were up was because more people were looking for jobs (either a job to replace a lost job or a step-up job). Virtually every other piece of news was negative.
They were saying that restaurant activity was down and the reason they gave was that food prices were coming down and therefore, more people were eating at home. What planet do these news people live on? Food is not coming down. People are cutting their trips to local restaurants because they are cutting back on expenses.
Consumer Reports came out and showed that getting a college education is not always a good idea as many students are so broke from paying back school loans that they are delaying buying houses, getting married or having kids. You know how the saying goes that the early bird gets the worm, well the crooked banks (joined by the Govt, and Universities) grabbed these students very early in life and got them in over their heads. By the time they graduated from college with these big loans, the job markets tanked and salary levels became stagnant with very little change. As a result, all of the economic activity that normally would have occurred for young upcoming college grads starting a new life were forfeited so they could pay the bankers for those school loans! That means that all of the housing, hard goods industries, baby and family related purchases, that a young family would normally be active in are gone or at the very least delayed. Furthermore, today's young people are getting married later and buying houses later or not at all. This all adds up to a lower level of economic activity than we had traditionally seen in this country.
Then as they graduate they need Obamacare and healthcare insurance costs are also out of control. So fewer jobs, lower wages, higher insurance and rental costs, higher food costs, a manipulated jobs markets, a manipulated stock market, and so on and so on.
Crooked banks and the Federal Reserve have manipulated the LIBOR rates, precious metals exchanges, printed money like it is going out of style (which it is, by the way) and at zero interest rate for their buddies (certainly not for us - look at your credit card rates).
Combine this with endless wars, refugee programs which involve subsidies paid by the US taxpayer for millions of people from other countries, 100 Million Americans who are not working and are on food stamps and other Govt. programs and you have a tinder box ready to catch fire and burn out of control.
Oh, I forgot, as usual the jobs report says that fewer jobs were for higher salary level jobs and most were for hospitality. Every month it says that Hospitality has a high hiring rate. They count each part time waitress and bartender as 1 job. So when a person has 2 and 3 jobs on a part time basis, that equals 2 and 3 jobs. There is so much manipulation in these numbers that they become useless figures.
Do yourself a favor and judge the market by the: number of retail store/chain closures, frequency of sales events, number of grown children living at home with parents, your shopping mall vacancy rates, food price increases, and many other factors. The unemployment rate at 4.9% is so manipulated it is similar to a middle aged woman having her 3rd 39th birthday. What is even worse is when the pundits on Wall Street talk shows describe the jobs report and they don't even take the time to analyze the component indicators of the actual report. All that they go by is the number of jobs, and not the type of jobs, being added. I am sorry to say that adding a high number of part-time waitress and bartender jobs will not solve our economic woes.
I'll see ya next month when the August Jobs Report comes out. I can't wait!