USMC - Employment Data Contradicts Itself
2024-03-12 07:30:00 ET
Summary
- Establishment Survey rises 275,000 while the Household Survey declines by -184,000.
- With institutional investors clearly skewed to a few high-tech issues that drive the SP500 higher (the top 10-20), much of the rest (the remaining 480) continue to offer historical discounts to their strong financial performances.
- The employment reports are sloppy, but industrial US continues to expand and hire in many well-managed companies as the reports come in.
Establishment Survey rises 275,000 while the Household Survey declines by -184,000. The difference between these reports is assumed to be the level of self-employed, which declined to levels near the COVID lockdown level. Some analysts have claimed the data has been manipulated to support the current administration's reelection chances. The claim comes from excessive hiring by government and is captured by the Establishment Survey detail that shows government employees surged from Feb 2022's 22,052,000 to Jan 2024's 23,180,000. The current level of government employment stands at a historic high, topping even the near 1mil short-term employment added by the Obama Administration in an effort to stimulate economic activity post-Sub-Prime Recession, Apr 2010. I will leave it to others to infer intent. Note: The Household Survey which is intended to capture general employment has stalled while Personal Income, Retail Sales and other key 'hard counts' of economic activity remain non-recessionary in the face of nearly every sentiment-based indicator forecasting a hard recession (I say "nearly" because I cannot locate any that are positive, and I may have missed one)....
Employment Data Contradicts Itself