First Friday of the Month

Not bad


Still very low


The worst jobs got the biggest pay increase


Looks like IT is a bunch of lemings jumping off a cliff.*

So, we have the monthly jobs numbers, with non-farm payrolls increasing by 339,000, hourly wages increasing by 4.3% year over year, and the unemployment rate increasing by 0.3% to 3.7%, which is still pretty damn low:

Hiring surged this spring, the latest sign the U.S. economy maintains momentum in the face of rising interest rates and complicating the Federal Reserve’s decision over whether to pause rate increases this month.

U.S. employers added a seasonally adjusted 339,000 jobs in May and the prior two months’ payrolls were revised up by nearly 100,000, the Labor Department said Friday. Workers gained more than 1.5 million jobs in 2023, more evidence of economic vitality, including robust consumer spending and a stabilizing housing market.

I calling the, "Stabilizing housing market," a dead cat bounce. 

As the saying goes, "If dropped from a sufficient height, anything can bounce, even a dead cat."

………

The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 3.7% in May, still near historic lows but an uptick from April’s 3.4%, the Labor Department said. Average hourly earnings grew a solid 4.3% in May over the prior year, similar to annual gains in March and April.

………

The average workweek fell to 34.3 hours, the lowest since April 2020 near the start of the pandemic. As a result of fewer hours worked, average weekly earnings advanced at a slower rate than hourly earnings, and gains have cooled since the start of the year.

Falling workweek is a pretty good indicator of a slowdown. 

The first thing that a business cuts when they see a downturn is hours.

The labor-force participation rate, the share of Americans who are working or actively seeking jobs, remained flat in May at 62.6% and below the February 2020 prepandemic level of 63.3%. That partly reflects the aging U.S. population. Among workers age 25 to 54, the participation rate rose to 83.4%, a level last touched in 2007.

Yes, it "Partly" reflects the aging workforce, and "Partly" reflects possibly tens of millions of people disabled by long Covid.

On the other hand, the fact that something over ½ million workers are out of the workforce because they areare dead pushes the participation number higher, because the denominator has gotten significantly smaller.

I expect the beatings from the Federal Reserve to continue, with 250 basis point (¼%) rate increases continuing through at most of next year.

^*Yes, I know, lemmings don't actually jump off of cliffs, in the Disney film White Wlderness, director James Algar literally threw the rodents off of a cliff for dramatic effect.