The Jobs Report Was a Bust

I said that the stock market will probably stay in a holding pattern until we get a better idea of how well the jobs market is recovering and how the corporate earnings front looks.

This morning we learned that the jobs market isn’t quite so hot. The Labor Department reported that a meager 120,000 nonfarm payroll jobs were created last month. That’s half the gain from February. Wall Street had been expecting a gain of 205,000. The unemployment rate ticked down to 8.2% from 8.3% the month before.

Over the last seven years, the U.S. economy has created a grand total of minus 13,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. If we were to have the same jobs-to-population ratio as 12 years ago, there would have to be 14.6 million more jobs, or 22.6 million fewer people. There is now an all-time record of 100.5 million American adult civilians without jobs (civilian non-institutional population over the age 16 not working). That’s a 34% increase since 2000.

Although the stock market is closed today, the bond market rose as investors migrated toward more conservative assets.

Posted by on April 6th, 2012 at 11:14 am


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