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Huzzah! 274,000 New Jobs

Monster number out of the BLS this morning: Not only did employers ramp up hiring in April, but the awful Jobs data for March were revised up to 146,000 from an initial estimate of 110,000 payrolls,. The strong February data got even stronger, going to 300,000, from the 243,000 previously reported.

This lends credibility to the soft patch theme (opined elsewhere).  That's a net positive. It also kills the "Fed now can go on hold for a few meetings" chatter -- I'm not sure that meme had gained enough traction for this to be any worse than neutral.

I sitll have to drill down through all the data -- sometimes the headline can be misleading -- but this is a significant data point.

I'm back to watching my levels, and getting ready to flip more bullish (on a closing basis) as necessary . . .

Friday, May 06, 2005 | 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments

Er, why is it that every time there's a strong jobs report, such a high percentage comes from the birth/death model? This report has 257k of the 274k coming from the birth/death model (93% of the "jobs"). Must we rely on statistical (bogus) tweaks to make the number? C'mon! 90k of those jobs were in leisure and hospitality. Are we getting all goosed up over bellboy, valet, and short order cook jobs? Like they really add purchasing power to the economy...

In the late 90s we had "pro forma earnings". Now we have "birth/death jobs numbers" and "core CPI/PPI". A few years from now, I can see everyone looking back and saying, how could we have been so naive?

Posted by: Mike | May 6, 2005 4:23:25 PM