Is the Monster Jobs Report Just a Head-Fake?

Financial markets have sustained themselves for nearly two years now on the hope that within 1-2 quarters, the Fed will finally relent and start lowering interest rates. This hope gets dashed again and again by data showing stubbornly persistent high employment, high GDP growth, and high inflation, but the hope refuses to die.

Long-term interest rates had been falling nicely for the last month, based on expectations of rate cuts in the fall. Then came Friday’s jobs report, and, blam, up went 10-year rates again.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published its “Establishment” survey of data gleaned from employers. Non-farm payrolls rose by US 272k.  This was appreciably higher than the 180k consensus expectation.

The plot below indicates that this number fits into a trend of essentially steady, fairly high employment gains (suggesting ongoing inflationary pressures):

There are fundamental reasons to take the BLS Establishment figures with a grain of salt. They have a history of significant revisions some months after first publication. Also, BLS uses a  “birth/death” model for small businesses, which can account for some 50% (!) of the job gains they report.  [1]

Another factor is that all of the net “jobs” created in recent quarters are reported to be part-time. According to Bret Jensen at Seeking Alpha, “Part-time jobs rose 286,000 during the quarter, while full-time jobs fell by just over 600,000. This is a continuation of a concerning trend where over the past year, roughly 1.5 million part-time positions were created while approximately one million full-time jobs were lost. This difference is that the BLS survey does not account for people working two or three jobs, which are now at a record as many Americans have struggled to maintain their standard of living during the inflationary environment of the past couple of years.”

It seems, then, that this week’s huge “jobs added” figure is not to be taken as indicating that the economy is overheated. However, it is still warm enough that rate cuts will be postponed yet again. A different BLS survey (“Household”) showed unemployment creeping up from 4.0% to 4.1%, which again suggests a more or less steady and fairly robust employment picture.

As far as drivers of inflation, I would look especially at wage growth. That is fitfully slowing, but not nearly enough to get us to the Fed’s 2% annual inflation target. My sense is that ongoing enormous federal deficit spending will keep pumping money into the economy fast enough to keep inflation high. High inflation will prevent significant interest rate cuts, assuming the Fed remains responsible. The interest payments on the federal debt will balloon due to the high rates, leading to even more deficit spending.  If we actually get an economic downturn, leading to job insecurity and a willingness of workers to accept slower wage growth in the private sector, the federal spending floodgates will open even wider.

This makes hard assets like gold look attractive, to hedge against inflating U.S. dollars. This is one reason China has been quietly selling off its dollar hoard, and buying gold instead.

[1] For more in-depth treatments of employment statistics, see posts by fellow blogger Jeremy Horpedahl, e.g. here.