First Friday of the Month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's actually a pretty good report with non-farm payroll increasing by 227,000, though the unemployment rate rose by .1% to 4.2%.

I attribute the latter to more people reentering the job market.

The US economy added 227,000 jobs in November, a sharp rebound after the previous month’s total was dragged down by hurricanes and the Boeing strike.

Friday’s number, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, beat a consensus forecast of 200,000 by economists surveyed by Reuters. The unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage point to 4.2 per cent.

November’s jobs growth marked a jump from 12,000 new positions initially recorded for October — the weakest employment report of the Biden administration. The figure was revised to 36,000 in Friday’s data release.

The consensus among Fed watchers is that there will be a 25 basis point (¼%) rate cut at their December meeting, for what it's worth. (IMNSHO, it ain't worth much)

Much of this is likely due to recovery from the hurricanes and the end of a number of strikes, most notably at Boeing.

It should also be noted that the household survey, which is typically more volatile than the payroll report, showed a decrease in employment:

………

This is not new territory for Alphaville. We started writing on this around the time it started to be a thing last autumn, and we did a further dive into the differences in June. But to put some numbers on the discrepancy, the household survey reports around 700,000 fewer workers from the peak last November, while the payroll survey reports around 1.6 million more workers. It’s more than a bit weird that a working population around half the size of Ohio’s appears to have fallen down the back of the sofa. This is no rounding error.

The answer is probably somewhere in between, and the thing to be noted is that it's pretty f%$#ing clear that the BLS stats have still not adjusted to our post pandemic reality.

I think that we are in for a bumpy ride, and I think that this will start with a collapse in either cryptocurrency and/or the AI bubble bursting.