Jobs: Really a good number?

Posted Jun 5th 2009 2:10PM by Todd Harrison
Filed under: Employees, Economic Data, Recession

This post was written by Minyanville contributor Tom Fant.

The employment number was better than expected. No question about it. Looking behind the number, I see all industries still contracting albeit less so except education/health.

Leisure was up but only 3k. Federal government hiring was negative for the first time this year. I'm still watching the hiring of temp workers, which is still negative but just barely at -7k which is much better than previous reports and could be a sign of good things to come.

Negatives are that the work week is down .1 hours and I'm told that's the equivalent of losing 250k jobs. The household employment number (taken from a sample of 50,000 households) was -437k which is what caused the unemployment rate to jump to 9.4%.

Ok, now for the part that makes me sick. The birth/death adjustment added 220k (+77k in leisure/hospitality) jobs. That's up 25% from the same month last year and brings the two-month total to 446k.

I agree with Todd that the risk rally started on the worst numbers and will probably end on decent economic numbers. Expectations of future economic numbers will be revised higher and upside surprises will not be as easy.

Tags: employment, hiring, inthenews, unemployment