Dave Stockman: Here’s a newsflash that CNBC didn’t mention. According to the BLS, the US economy generated a
miniscule 11,000 jobs in the month of December.
Yet notwithstanding the fact that almost nobody works outdoors any more, the BLS fiction writers added 281,000 to their headline number to cover the “seasonal adjustment.” This is done on the apparent truism that December is generally colder than November and that workers get holiday vacations.
Of course, this December was much warmer, not colder, than average. And that’s not the only deviation from normal seasonal trends.
The Christmas selling season this year, for example, was absolutely not comparable to the ghosts of Christmas past. Bricks and mortar retail is in turmoil and in secular decline due to Amazon and its e-commerce ilk, and this trend is accelerating by the year.
So too, energy and export based sectors have been thrown for a loop in the last few months by a surging dollar and collapsing commodity prices. Likewise, construction activity has been so weak in this cycle—-and for the good reason that both commercial and residential stock is vastly overbuilt owing to two decades of cheap credit—–that its not remotely comparable to historic patterns.
Never mind. The BLS always adds the same big dollop of jobs to the December establishment survey come hell or high water. In fact, the seasonal adjustment has averaged 320,000 for the last 12 years!
For crying out loud, folks, every December is different—–and not just because of the vagaries of the weather. Capitalism is about incessant change and reallocation of economic activity and resources. And now the globalized ebbs and flows of economic activity have only accentuated the rate and intensity of these adjustments.
His claim, which will cause some web chatter, is that the large jobs gains were mainly a standard seasonal adjustment to estimate net Christmas labor. So we are back to sorting out exactly what the annual January slowdown is about. See whatch for the revisions.
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