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BLS monthly payroll report

Puppycow

Penultimate Amazing
Puppycow
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Jan 9, 2003
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Economists are predicting a big gain in jobs this month. I hope they are correct. The official number is to be announced in a few hours at 8:30 EDT.

Payrolls Report

The Labor Department report, due at 8:30 a.m. in Washington, may show U.S. payrolls climbed by 536,000 in May, the most since 1983, according to the median forecast of 82 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The jobless rate is forecast to fall to 9.8 percent from 9.9 percent the previous month. Survey estimates for the gain in payrolls range from 220,000 to 750,000.
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Pretty wide range of estimates there. Anything over 500 K would be huge IMO.

Last month's numbers (290,000).

The median forecast seems a bit too good to be true, so I would take the under on the over/under for that number.

Any thoughts?
 
But..but..the stimulus, and all that!

Poor Obama can't seem to catch a break lately.
 
Puppycow said:
Wow, that is disappointing abysmal, considering that 411,000 (~95%) were census hires.
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Fixed it ... at least with terms the market has been using. If this were not a census year, well ... I think you get the picture. Private job growth has slowed, significantly, and I would not be surprised to see in the coming months net job losses instead of gains.
 
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quixotecoyote said:
Source? Seems high for a single month of hiring.
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What rock did you just crawl out from under? :D

OK, just a joke, but it's pretty much everywhere and it's been all over the news. Here's just one of many articles.

From the link ...

The government said that 411,000 of the jobs created in May were temporary positions with the once-a-decade U.S. census and not the kind of employment that can drive a sustained economic recovery. That meant that the overall private sector employment growth for the month was anemic — up by just 41,000.
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Last month I was hoping for a strong positive report and was disappointed, this month I'm dreading a dismal one.

One thing to remember though is that last month's numbers may be revised in one direction or the other. There's some reasons to think that it may not have been as awful as initially reported, and hence that direction might be up.

Here's hoping for an upward revision to the previous months' numbers and hopefully nothing too horrible for this initial report either.
 
Mixed results

The unemployment rate actually improved from 9.7% to 9.5%. :)

The private sector added 83,000 jobs. Not really good but better than last time, and it could be revised up before all is said and done.

April was revised up by 23,000 and May by 2,000.

Overall the number was down by 125,000 but that mostly reflected census workers and was expected.

Dow is down by 17 atm, little changed on the news.
 
Another point is that ~650,000 were dropped from what are considered to be in the "Work Force". Had those been counted as "unemployed" there would likely not have been a drop to 9.5%. Also, hourly earnings and hours worked were down.
 
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