Blue World Employment Situation Report Analysis October 22, 2013

Blue World Employment Situation Report Analysis

Release Date:  Usually the first Friday of each month

Release Site: www.bls.gov

Market Sensitivity: VERY HIGH

Management Value: VERY HIGH

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Brain surgery is not rocket science to a brain surgeon©

Better late than… Sorry.  We can’t back that up.

This is what we waited for?  The numbers are short so let’s get to ‘em right away.

The BLS reports total non-farm payroll increased by 148,000 for September.  That was a pretty big miss regarding the expectations of the “experts” but it gets worse.  In a switch from recent reports, government added 22,000 to the total, making the private sector gains even less inspiring at 126,000.     The rate fell to 7.2 percent, but we all know why.  The number of those not in the labor force continues its meteoric rise and is mirrored by the participation rate free-fall.  The work week, overtime and wage increases remain quite underwhelming as the diffusion rate in manufacturing continues its flirtation with 50.

The Madness of King Market

We’d like to take a moment to focus on the markets.  We saw the following headline this morning:

U.S. equity markets rallied after a round of tepid data on the U.S. labor market stoked hopes the Federal Reserve might have to wait until as late as March to begin paring back its massive bond-buying program.

At the top of each jobs report analysis we identify the jobs report influence over markets as VERY HIGH.  That remains true, however, it has become for the opposite reason it used to.  We remain very skeptical and cautious regarding the markets because, in spite of them doing so for this long, we can’t get comfortable with the idea that bad economic news will perpetually cause the markets to fly because they believe the Fed won’t stop buying bonds.  This is very unsettling.  The so-called quantitative easing, bond buying, etc., is one of the biggest risks to our long term economic outlook (explained at http://ht.ly/q3Xje) so the markets cause us great pause these days as they put more emphasis on government action than they do on economic fundamentals.  Very unsettling.

The next report has been rescheduled for release on Friday, November 8, the second Friday of the month, due to the partial shutdown earlier this month.

Thanks for reading, and please stay tuned…

Release Site: www.bls.gov

Every effort is made to ensure accuracy of data transcription but accuracy cannot be guaranteed.  The official release site should be cross referenced.  The analysis represents the opinion of Blue World Asset Managers, Ltd. who does not warrant or guarantee predictions based on its analysis.

©Blue World Asset Managers, LTD Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Leave a Reply