This time it’s the turn of the usually unflappable Dennis Gartman — author of the Gartman Letter and CNBC talking head– to question the veracity of Friday’s unbelievable US payroll numbers.
As he sums up in his Tuesday note (our emphasis):
Turning back to the Employment Situation Report of last Friday for a moment if we might, with more than 9 million workers here saying that they are working parttime because of “economic reasons” there is very clearly a large and disconcerting “excess of demand” for work compared to the jobs that are presently available.
Workers simply have become discouraged and are still pulling themselves out of the job market, thus forcing the participation rate, as it is known, to its lowest level in two decades. Further… and this really does cause us some confusion and casts doubt upon the veracity of Friday’s report… the civilian labour force was actually reported to have fallen when mere demographics… mere arithmetic… said it must increase instead.
We wonder how this can be? Further, there are other anomalies, not the least of which is the continued reliance upon rather faulty seasonal adjustments and an even more faulty “birth/Death” factor, but we shall leave those for another day. The “economic reasons” question and that of the “participation rate” are sufficiently disconcerting for our purposes at the moment to make us just a tad skeptical of the euphoria surrounding Friday’s report. It was a good report. It was a nice report. It was a report consistent with the first few weeks, historically, of an economic rebound, but it was not a report to elicit Hosannas.
Now where did we hear about that birth/death factor before?
Related links:
On outperforming the US Bureau of Economic Analysis – FT Alphaville
US jobs – Lex