INSIGHTS
MAR
8
COSTA’S CORNER
“It’s Friday, Aint got no job. Got nothing to do”
Paraphrased a touch from the movie “Friday”.
By now, you know I don’t sit here and rattle off numbers that you can easily obtain from any business channel. I try to delve into numbers and come up with a little bit of a different story and let the reader decide if it’s relevant or not.
The JOBS report came out today and the headline numbers were not good. It would seem from those numbers that the economic recovery we have been enjoying over the last 9 years has come to a complete stop. It hasn’t but the numbers don’t lie, and it was an abysmal month for job creation.
Wage growth is continuing, and I still believe this is the more important data set.
Any truly recovery starts with people going back to work, but those jobs, unless they pay a better than average wage, don’t create momentum and expansion. They just take people off of state provided assistance to a different form of support.
It’s the wage growth that flows through the economy and creates a more lasting, expanding recovery. People get paid more they spend more, they save more. Simple as that.
Wages rose .4% and that was better than expected. Annualized, wage growth this year looks to be about 3.5% and that is strong by any measure.
Here is an anomaly that you mind interesting or not. It seems we have this miniscule job growth number come out every 15 months or so.
May of 2016 there were 21,000 new jobs created, September 2017, 18,000 and now, February of 2019. What does that mean? Probably nothing but be prepared for some strange jobs number in June 2020.
There is one data set I tend to ignore in the JOBS report. It’s the “real unemployed” or the U-6 number. It came in at 7.3%, down from 8.1% last month.
This number includes the disparaged people who are not actively looking for work, and people who hold part-time jobs for economic reasons.
I ignore this one simply because how on earth can the government accurately know how many people are disparaged and how do they know that people who report part-time jobs on the books don’t have full time jobs off the books.
I like to look at what the government can accurately register not the guess work they surely get wrong.
Things may get more tempting as I watch prices fall a bit more.
50% Stocks
25% Fixed Income
25% Cash
Paraphrased a touch from the movie “Friday”.
By now, you know I don’t sit here and rattle off numbers that you can easily obtain from any business channel. I try to delve into numbers and come up with a little bit of a different story and let the reader decide if it’s relevant or not.
The JOBS report came out today and the headline numbers were not good. It would seem from those numbers that the economic recovery we have been enjoying over the last 9 years has come to a complete stop. It hasn’t but the numbers don’t lie, and it was an abysmal month for job creation.
Wage growth is continuing, and I still believe this is the more important data set.
Any truly recovery starts with people going back to work, but those jobs, unless they pay a better than average wage, don’t create momentum and expansion. They just take people off of state provided assistance to a different form of support.
It’s the wage growth that flows through the economy and creates a more lasting, expanding recovery. People get paid more they spend more, they save more. Simple as that.
Wages rose .4% and that was better than expected. Annualized, wage growth this year looks to be about 3.5% and that is strong by any measure.
Here is an anomaly that you mind interesting or not. It seems we have this miniscule job growth number come out every 15 months or so.
May of 2016 there were 21,000 new jobs created, September 2017, 18,000 and now, February of 2019. What does that mean? Probably nothing but be prepared for some strange jobs number in June 2020.
There is one data set I tend to ignore in the JOBS report. It’s the “real unemployed” or the U-6 number. It came in at 7.3%, down from 8.1% last month.
This number includes the disparaged people who are not actively looking for work, and people who hold part-time jobs for economic reasons.
I ignore this one simply because how on earth can the government accurately know how many people are disparaged and how do they know that people who report part-time jobs on the books don’t have full time jobs off the books.
I like to look at what the government can accurately register not the guess work they surely get wrong.
Things may get more tempting as I watch prices fall a bit more.
50% Stocks
25% Fixed Income
25% Cash