Look Out Below

We just got the May job numbers, and it's pretty grim.

Of course, the stock marked soared, because they believe that this will lead the Federal Reserve to cut rates, because investors are psychopaths.

More significantly, it appears increasingly likely that we are at the leading edge of a downturn:

As of 8:29 a.m. Friday, things were shaping up for the Federal Reserve to face a real conundrum at its policy meeting in less than two weeks.

Some financial market indicators, mainly in the bond market, were suggesting that the economy was weakening and that the Fed would need to cut interest rates in the coming months to prevent a recession. But there was little evidence of a major slowdown — only a few soft data points here and there.

In particular, the United States labor market has been booming, not at all suggesting an American economy in need of rescue with interest rate policy.

The good news out of the Labor Department’s May employment report released at 8:30 a.m. Friday is that the Fed no longer faces a conundrum. The bad news is that it showed a job market that was not as robust as it had seemed.

It’s not just that the economy added only 75,000 jobs last month, far less than the 180,000 forecast. That might be chalked up to the statistical randomness that can cause the numbers to bounce around in ways that don’t reflect the underlying reality of the economy.

More worrisome is that the report also revised previous months’ numbers down by 75,000, meaning that the blockbuster spring job creation rates were considerably more modest.

It is now clear that there really is softer job creation in 2019 than there was in 2018 — an average of 164,000 jobs a month so far this year, compared with 223,000 last year.

………

Perhaps most significant, wage growth is also steady or slightly declining, rather than accelerating. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers rose 0.2 percent in May, and are up 3.1 percent over the last year. Wages rose 3.4 percent in the year ended in February.

If this really were a situation of softening job growth because employers were up against the constraints of full employment, you would expect them to have to pay more to find scarce workers. Instead, the wage growth picture is steady as she goes.

………

More worrisome is that the report also revised previous months’ numbers down by 75,000, meaning that the blockbuster spring job creation rates were considerably more modest.