Unemployment up a tick to 8.3%.
Job growth was up, but still sluggish at 163,000. Another 150,000 abandoned hope and exited the workforce. Broader U-6 measure was up slightly to an even 15%.
We got to 8.3% because not quite enough people gave up to mask the weak jobs growth. If only a few more people had really given in to their despair, President Obama could have held things steady at 8.2! The system is broken, folks.
The interesting number for July was the Brith/Death at +53,000. B/D is the number BLS totally makes up, I mean pulls completely out of its butt, to account for new small businesses popping up and old small businesses quietly going broke. I cannot reiterate strongly enough just how phony-boloney it is. The B/D model has been completely broken, ever since ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank put the kibosh on entrepreneurship. And yet, the BLS still uses it.
So nearly one-third of July’s net jobs increase came from BLS’s orifice. June’s anemic 80k increase got revised downward — unexpectedly! — partly on account of correcting that month’s wild-ass guess for B/D. Nobody knows how many of July’s 53k will be found to have been purely imaginary, but recent history suggests a pretty big downward revision — unexpectedly! — when we revisit July’s number next month.
Sigh.
UPDATE: Zero Hedge notes on Twitter that the B/D number for July 2010 was 5k, and 6k for July of last year. This year it’s ten times greater? “Spot the outlier,” Durden advises.
Yeah, yesterday’s consensus figure of 100k jobs will probably turn out to be pretty much spot-on.
AND ANOTHER THING: Total employment down month-over-month by nearly 200,000. Only part time employment went up at all.
So how do we account for the rest of the figures? We don’t. They’re bullshit.
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