US businesses want to hire millions of workers. The only problem is that those businesses don’t want to pay those workers enough to entice them off their parents’ sofas. So the jobs listings grow, and mainstream media clowns like Joe (@TheStaleWort) Weisenthal go crazy over the numbers.  In addition to Bloomberg headline being a lie, it missed the most important fact in the data.

This is how far US financial “journalism” has sunken. Considering how bad it was to begin with, this is quite an accomplishment.

Yes, job openings surged. They rose by 25,000 at the end of December to 4.43 million on an actual, not seasonally adjusted basis. That is 30.7% higher than the level of December 2013 which is an enormous surge. As Decembers go, the gain of 25,000 jobs from the end of November was also big. The November-December change is usually negative. The 10 year average for December is a decline of 75,000 jobs. The chart doesn’t lie. The increase in job openings is accelerating.

Exactly where are those job openings? Except for State and Local Goverment jobs, they’re mostly in all the lowest paying sectors. 61% of the job openings were in sectors that pay the lowest wages in the US economy.

The next largest sector was Manufacturing at 6%. No other employment group had more than 4% of the jobs total. These sectors also had the largest year to year percentage gains. Maybe that’s why new hires in December hit an all time record low as a percentage of job openings. The JOLTS survey began in 2000.

And by the way, there weren’t 5 million job openings. That number is made up via the spurious method of extrapolating annualized fictitious monthly seasonally adjusted data. If the monthly data is off, which it always is, just multiply the error by 12. That way you can make the annualized number even more spectacular.

The number of actual job openings was 4.43 million per the BLS. It was the biggest December on record so there really was no need to exaggerate. Weisenthal just brianwilliamsized it a little.