Job Headlines Still Mask the Real Story – Ep. 464

Recorded May 3, 2019

See Peter at the SALT Conference at the Bellagio, Las Vegas May 7-10, 2019
https://www.salt.org/bio-schiff-peter
Jobs Surge in April, Unemployment Rate Falls
Today is Jobs Friday; the first Friday of the month, that we get the nonfarm payroll number.  I don't know if the markets anticipated more or Donald Trump, because of course he's ready to send out a tweet when we get a better than expected number.  That's what happened today; we got another number that was better than expected.  Certainly the headline number - they were looking for an increase of 180,00 jobs, which would have been a bit of a reduction over last month's 196,000 jobs - which was revised down slightly to 189,000. We ended up getting 263,000 jobs, so another number with a 2-handle - a much bigger number than had been anticipated, and the unemployment number, also surprisingly dropped. Two tenths, from 3.8% to 3.6%.  Hispanic unemployment actually hit an all-time record low. I expected Donald Trump to tweet about that, because obviously he's being accused of being a racist.  Clearly, if he can show that, "Well, look, Hispanic unemployment is at an all-time record low, how are my policies racist, if we have a record low in unemployment among Hispanics?" He did tweet about the jobs numbers and the low unemployment numbers.
Which Numbers are Fraudulent Now?
But again, I reminded Trump (not that he actually ever reads my tweets, he gets so many) that when he brags about how low the unemployment rate is, the official rate, I always remind him, "Wait a minute, you are the person who accused these numbers of being fraudulent, fakes, phonies, a scam - Donald Trump as a candidate was very critical of Barack Obama's phony recovery mainly because Obama was hiding behind (what Trump said were) fraudulent statistics. Well, these are the same statistics that Donald Trump is embracing - the same statistics that he criticized.  So, I guess the President no longer about all of the discouraged workers who are no longer looking for work, he doesn't care about all the people who are working part time, but would prefer to work full time, but they can't find a full time job, so they settle for a part time jobs.  These are the people who are not included in that 3.6% unemployment rate.  The President cared about those people when he was a candidate.