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Friday, November 06, 2015

The Most Surprising Thing About Today's Jobs Report

After several months of weak and deteriorating payrolls prints, perhaps the biggest tell today's job number would surprise massively to the upside came yesterday from Goldman, which as we noted earlier, just yesterday hiked its forecast from 175K to 190K. And while as Brown Brothers said after the reported that it is "difficult to find the cloud in the silver lining" one clear cloud emerges when looking just a little deeper below the surface.

That cloud emerges when looking at the age breakdown of the October job gains as released by the BLS' Household Survey. What it shows is that while total jobs soared, that was certainly not the case in the most important for wage growth purposes age group, those aged 25-54.

As the chart below shows, in October the age group that accounted for virtually all total job gains was workers aged 55 and over. They added some 378K jobs in the past month, representing virtually the entire increase in payrolls. And more troubling: workers aged 25-54 actually declined by 35,000, with males in this age group tumbling by 119,000!

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Most of the jobs are very part time paying only minimum wage with no benefits and they don't count those who have completely dropped out of the job market because they have given up looking.

Anonymous said...

All of those jobs are service jobs at Walmart, K-Mart, Target, and McDonald's.

Anonymous said...

They can spin this anyway they want. Nothing has changed since the great recession started in 2008. If anything, it has gotten from bad to worse. Only good times if you work for the BOE and are school teacher or an overpaid administrator!