Market Talk

Wish they'd do that census thing every year.

Yes, yes, I know, the jobs report was better than expected, not as bad as feared, a glimmer of hope, a kernel of confidence, a slash of color in an otherwise drab picture.

I’ll tell you what, I was prepared to make a point on this morning’s News Hub, a good point. But I’ll admit, the numbers were better than expected, they surprised me, too, and that was the story, and well, you know we get only a few minutes up there, so this point I wanted to make got pushed aside in my mind and I never brought it up.

It’s this: don’t lose sight of the bottom line.

Look, a net 54,000 jobs were lost in August. Yes, I know, the private sector created 67,000 jobs. But the Census Bureau let go 114,000 workers, temps hired specifically for the decennial poll. Still, the economy on balance shed jobs, and as far as growth goes, and consumer spending, and all those things, does it matter if the job lost was a public one or a private one? A temporary one or a permanent one? It just means that somebody, well, 114,000 somebodies, was getting a paycheck and now isn’t.

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It's worse than you think, Mr. President.

Listen, unless Congress is prepared to make the Census a continuous thing (rather than a once every 10 years thing,) we’re still stuck in a bit of a spot here in the land of Coca-Cola, no matter the President says the economy’s “getting better by the day.”

I don’t know how else to say: this was a very bad, damaging jobs report. We are almost a year away from the point most people consider the end of the recession, last July, and if you buy the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the private sector created 41,000 jobs in May. Sure, the unemployment rate fell, but that has more to do with people dropping out of the labor force rather than finding jobs, which also incidentally is not a good sign (and of course, those people once up a time were counted as part of the labor force rather than conveniently excluded these days.)

My colleague and co-host on the Markets Hub, Madeleine Lim, opined earlier this week that we are starting to see what the economy looks like without all that government stimulus.

The economy added 430,000 jobs in May. The Census Bureau added 411,000. The private sector added 41,000 (the public sector actually lost 20,000 jobs as states are being forced into a Grecian-style austerity mode.) With 15 million people out of work, and nearly half of them out of work for more than six months, you have to have some seriously rose-tinted glasses to interpret that as a sign of strength.

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