The employment report polishes off what was already a depressing week. The turn of events in the budget negotiations was deeply distressing. It just seemed like it should be impossible to imagine that budget cutting is the order of the day when unemployment is over 9%, 10-year Treasuries hover near 3%, and a Democrat is in the White House. Yet possible it is.
The extent to which our leadership seems determined to follow in the path of the Japanese is absolutely stunning. My impression of the last two decades is that Japanese policymakers were never able to keep their eyes on the weak economy, instead always eager to turn their attention back to "normalizing" policy – raising interest rates, raising taxes, cutting spending. Our leadership suffers from the same obsession.
The employment report should be a wake up call. A slap in the face. A bucket of cold water poured over your head. But it won’t. I suspect it will be seen as further evidence that stimulus is pointless, that austerity is the only solution.
Weakness spread far and wide throughout the report. No way to put lipstick on this pig. As others have noted, the labor force fell, the participation rate fell, the employment to population ratio fell, the number of employed plummeted, and the number of unemployed climbed. Private nonfarm payrolls gains a paltry 57k, and the drag from government cutbacks pulled the overall jobs gain to just 18k. Far short of the numbers needed to even hold unemployment steady.
And wages fell. Just a penny an hour, to be sure. But that penny is meaningful given the desperate fears of inflation that appeared to take hold on Constitution Ave. Without sharply rising wages, those fears are simply unfounded. This was the lesson of the post-1984 period. Why monetary policymakers are fixated on the pre-1984 period is a mystery.
What I noticed was the number of short-term unemployed:
A sharp rise in the number of people thrown into unemployment is definitely a red flag. The overall data picture is not pointing at recession yet, but this number reeks of something bad.
We can only hope some of the downward pressure on growth is relieved as the tsunami related disruptions fade and, more importantly in my mind, the sharp rise in oil prices has been arrested, at least for the moment. But even as these restraints lift, what remains? Oil prices have not plummeted like in 2008 to provide a big positive boost to real spending. And interest rates are no longer falling to provide and opportunity for a refinancing boom. So at best we return to trend growth, maybe a little above? Trend growth that was never sufficient in the first place?
Moreover, we still face significant headwinds in the second half of the year. The Europeans are determined to avoid resolution in their ongoing debt crisis. The ECB is determined to raise interest rates. And Congress and the White House are determined to pursue a path of fiscal austerity.
Bottom Line: Simply a weak report – unbelievably weak given the “recovery” is two years old. Weak enough – especially given falling wages – that it should prompt Bernanke & Co. to revisit their commitment to end large scale asset purchases. The next round of Fedspeak will be very interesting. Watch closely for the focus on “temporary” factors - code for watch and wait. At this juncture, they are still out of the game. I think the Fed will need to see another quarter of data before they begin to take seriously the possibility that they once again erred with a premature policy shift.
