NFP: +200k, What's Inside?

by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

So screams the headline:

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 200,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in construction, food services and drinking places, health care, and manufacturing.

Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.  What’s the inside look like?

As expected, January was a firing month; the non-adjusted figures show a drop in employment of 754,000.  This is normal, I remind you, since January is when all the seasonal workers from this holiday called “Christmas” are let go, and of course instead of reporting actual numbers the Bureau of Lies and Scams applies their “seasonal adjustments” so as to make it all sound better.  Over the last year, however, the unadjusted numbers show 2.3 million jobs added, which doesn’t sound too bad at all, until you realize that 600,000 of them, more or less, were split between extraction in the “health care” ripoff and places to get drunk.  At least the latter, when you hand over your money, is both voluntary and pleasurable.

Of note 513,000 people gave up last month, adding to the not in labor force figure.  On a 12-month basis that’s added 1.3 million parasites to the economy, many of whom are collecting “disability” checks while running marathons.

I used to print this chart every month but stopped because nobody cared.  It’s the truth, however, when adjusted for population and yet those cheerleading for various “job gains” on both sides of the political aisle have never, in my roughly 10- year history of publishing this series every month, held any elected official to account for it.  You can see that in the 2017 year Trump did enjoy a few months of positive rate-of-change figures on this basis, remembering that it’s a 12-month rolling figure, and thus has zerosensitivity to so-called “seasonal adjustments” (in other words, the BLS can’t lie their way out of this one for political purposes and neither can a candidate or office-holder.)  However, what is also clear is that there were massive and perhaps intentional distortions in the data over the last 12 months because with the annual adjustments we now know the run rate is in fact negative — that is, THERE HAS BEEN AN ACTUAL RATE OF JOB LOSS OVER THE LAST 12 MONTHS WHEN POPULATION EXPANSION IS CONSIDERED.

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