Payroll firm ADP says the US lost more than 300,000 jobs in January, and omicron is taking the blame.
December’s impressive jobs gains were also revised downwards.
“Unexpectedly” is the code word once again, as Wall Street had predicted the economy would produce 200,000 new jobs instead.
January is the first month since December 2020 that the economy has lost jobs.
Despite White House boasts that 2021 produced more jobs than any other year, we’re still more than 3.5 million jobs shy of where the economy was in February 2020, before the demonstrably useless COVID shutdowns.
The Biden economy hasn’t been creating new jobs. it has been recovering needlessly destroyed jobs — and far too slowly. Or at least it was until now. The expected “v-shaped recovery” has been impeded by continuing lockdowns in two of our biggest states, Democrat-run California and New York.
Return to economic normalcy has also been delayed by Bidenflation, Biden’s war on domestic energy production, and Biden’s return to ruthless overregulation.
“Service-providing industries were responsible for 274,000 of the job losses,” reports CNBC, “with goods producers falling by 27,000.”
The Biden administration knew this was coming, too.
On Monday, White House spokesweasel Jen Psaki pre-spun the lousy numbers, falsely claiming that the “nearly nine million people [who] called out sick in early January” might be counted as unemployed.
But that’s not how the Bureau of Labor Statistics (their report is due out Friday) or ADP counts job losses.
ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson, said, “The labor market recovery took a step back at the start of 2022 due to the effect of the omicron variant and its significant, though likely temporary, impact to job growth.”
Left unsaid: How omicron caused 300,000 people to lose their jobs.
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The Fed is also keeping a close eye on the jobs report. Our “transitory” inflation problem seems to have settled in for at least the medium term, but the Fed won’t raise inflation-killing interest rates so long as the job market is weak.
There’s a word for economic stagnation combined with inflation, something economists once believed could never happen at the same time: Stagflation.
That word was coined during the 1970s, the last time government over-regulation and funny-money policies combined to strangle growth and spark inflation.
Out of all the decades America could have re-lived, it had to be the ’70s?
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