We warned readers yesterday to “Prepare For Disappointment” with today’s jobs report, and sure enough that’s precisely what we got when moments ago the BLS reported that in August just 156K jobs were created, a big miss to the 180K expected, and following a sharp downward revision to June and July, which were revised to 210K and 189K, respectively, a 41K drop combined.
Not helping matters was the Household Survey, according to which the number of employed Americans declined by 74,000 to 153,439K.
The unemployment rate also disappointed, rising from 4.3% to 4.4%, while avg hourly earnings missed, increasing by 2.5% Y/Y in August, below the 2.6% estimate and the same as July.
The sequential increase in earnings was just 0.1%, also below the 0.2% expected, and far below the 0.3% in July. Furthermore, since average weekly hours declined also, from 34.5 to 34.4, average weekly earnings declined outright from $909.42 to $907.82 in August. Furthermore, average weekly earnings rose just 2.2% Y/Y, the lowest rate of increase since January.
While the labor force participation rate remained unchanged at 62.9%, the number of Americans not in the labor force increased once again, growing by 128K in August to 94.785 million.
Developing
via http://ift.tt/2woZZwX Tyler Durden