Some perspective on the "strong" jobs market from the Daily Pfennig:

"I traded emails with a longtime Pfennig reader on Friday, expressing my disgust with the fact that it has been a year filled with more business deaths than births, but the BLS continues to add jobs using their Birth/ Death Model. In February it was 132,000..  Given that we know that there are more deaths than births these days, shouldn't that have been a -132,000.  And if so, then we'd be talking about 32,000 new jobs created, which is still probably bloated.

My friend Dennis Miller of Miller's Money, a Casey Research letter, sent me a rant from somebody he reads that I wish I could replicate, for it goes through every number with facts, not surveys that are hedonically adjusted. I'm going to borrow some of that here:  Since 2008 we've added 3 million jobs, while 13 million people have supposedly left the workforce (yes a lot of baby boomers in there, but not 13 million) and the unemployment rates is supposedly lower today than it was in 2008. The working age population is up by 16 million, we only have 3 million more jobs, but the unemployment rate has fallen. 

So, in the end, because I really didn't mean to spend all day on this. Here's something to think about. I've been telling you over and over again that the economic data has been weak here in the U.S.  But let's get a quick overview just to refresh our memories.  What we have here  is an economy that's losing energy jobs left and right and by the truckload each month, we've seen manufacturing new orders decline for 6 straight months, we have corporate profits falling, real median household income sitting at 1989 levels, and 80% of all economic reports miss to the downside, and yet. We're told that 295,000 jobs were created in February.


I guess I should be celebrating, right? Why always be on the "dark side" of these things Chuck? Well, if it felt right, I would celebrate. the problem is, for me, that it just doesn't feel right.. The guy that I owe most of my feelings of trepidation with the BLS number to is John Williams of Shadowstats.com, who said of Friday's report, that "the drop in Unemployment Rate was due to Unemployed giving up looking for work, instead of finding work"  He also kept his Unemployment Rate figure at 23%... "