ECONOMICS

At first glance today's jobs report was indeed impressive: the surge in jobs according to both the household and establishment surveys indicated a strong rebound from recent monthly weakness…

… which coupled with the drop in unemployment rate, and upward historical revisions suggested that much of the recent labor market weakness may have been transitory. The one fly in the ointment was the jump in wage growth which strongly hinted that inflation is also back, just as we have been warning for months (especially now that oil is once again surging) and we will cross that bridge eventually, but not yet.

Instead for now let's focus on the parts of the jobs report which the BLS has traditionally used to mask headline weakness, such as part-time workers used to mask weakness in full-time jobs, or foreign-born workers surging at the expense of native-born. Well, this month there was little of that as well, and in fact, part-time workers dropped modestly as full-time workers rose…

… while native-born workers actually rebounded from a five year low as foreign-born workers dropped from an all-time high

And yet, it didn't take long to find what the BLS did this time to make the jobs appear much stronger than expected, a political imperative for the highly politicized agency tasked with making the Kamala/Biden economy appear stronger than it was exactly one month ahead of the election.

The answer, ironically, was in the number of government workers, which exploded higher, and were not only instrumental in pushing the Household Survey print much higher, but meant the difference between a 4.1% and 4.5% unemployment rate.

Here is what happened.

In September, the number of government workers as tracked by the Household Survey soared by 785K, from 21.421 million to 21.216 million, both seasonally adjusted (source: Table A8 from the jobs report). This was the biggest September surge in government workers on record (excluding the outlier print in June 2020 which was a reversal of the record plunge from the Covid collapse months before).

While government workers soared by the most on record, private workers rose by just 133K, a far more believable number, and one which however would (more…)

Bloomberg reports that EU member states have voted to slap tariffs of up to 45% on Chinese-made electric vehicles, ignoring warnings from some members that this dangerous move risks sparking an "economic cold war" with Beijing. 

The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, recently concluded its anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese imports of battery electric vehicles. The findings supported the Commission's move to implement the duties, which would last for (more…)

By John Gallagher of FreightWaves

President Joe Biden broke his silence on the labor dispute between the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) by accusing employers of hoarding profits.

“Ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic and in some cases profits grew in excess of 800 percent compared to their profits prior to the pandemic,” Biden said in a statement issued by the White House on Tuesday, after the ILA (more…)