Bubble bubble
Toil and trouble,
Savings burn
While assets double.
That certainly was a 'better than expected' Non-Farm Payrolls report number.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has gone back and revised every jobs report I have in my spreadsheet, back to at least 2004.
They have also revised the imaginary jobs, the Birth-Death model.
To give you an analogy, they did not just move the goalposts. They moved the entire field to a new stadium and redid every line, every marker, and every number that describes the field.
So anyway, in itself this was higher than expected, but hardly a great number. It showed a nation of part time bartenders and low paid servers, with another 390,000 or so Americans being written out of the official record. At least they are only erasing people on paper for now.
The Fed and their partners in government have the itch to raise interest rates. And to do so, without everyone throwing up over yet another in a series of policy errors, they need the cover of an 'improving economy' with a growing fear of inflation.
After all, it is a 'tight' job market. Especially if you want to work the day shift at McDonalds in a suburb for minimum wage.
WHAT IS THE VELOCITY OF MONEY? WHAT IS MEDIAN WAGE GROWTH? Why aren't the whiz kids talking about that when they start fretting about 'inflation.' Because they are idiots? Or just willfully blind.
The Fed would like to get interest rates up to one percent. This give them the room to cut rates again when their latest asset bubble collapses. That is it in a nutshell. They see the 'real economy' as cannon fodder in their increasingly self-absorbed financial engineering.
I am going to be more interested in what they do with those huge excess reserves which they have given pretty much for free to the Banks, for whom they are now paying them 25 risk free basis points. Will they keep raising that vigorish for doing nothing to their Banks? Because that is what it is, to say the least. There was intraday commentary about that here.
The propeller heads and careless few are enamoured of 'corporate profits, and wage pressures.' I think they will be much more preoccupied with the 'torches and pitchforks' indicators by late next year.
The dollar took off this morning as you might expect, with Europe pretty much falling into the abyss of their own hubris and delusions. I mean, with most of the world savagely cutting interest rates because they recognize that the global economy is failing, what else is an exceptional people to do?
And with the stronger dollar the multinational financiers will have sweeter pickings in picking up assets overseas. As for the real economy well, buck up and stop whining.
Let's see how gold and silver fare next week. They certainly took it on the chin today. But what else would you expect from a largely unregulated bucket shop where prices are largely symbolic bets, contingent on other bets and leverage?
Have a pleasant weekend.
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