We are still living a wacky economic times.
From ZeroHedge:
If the already jittery market needed another reason to be very confused today, it got it moments ago when the [Bureau of Labor and Statistics] reported February jobs data and which - on one hand - came in hotter than expected at the headline level, with some 311K jobs reportedly created in February, which while was a drop from last month's downward revised 504K, was well above the 225K consensus and was also above the whisper number of 250K.
...
But while the headline payroll number was hotter than expected - driven mostly by retail workers and waiters - the not so good data come from the unemployment rate, which unexpectedly jumped from 3.4% to 3.6%, and above the 3.4% consensus estimate as the number of unemployed workers jumped from 5.694MM to 5.936MM, more than the number of Employed workers (which increased from 160.138MM to 160.315MM), while the labor force increased by 1.7 million workers in the past 3 months.
Some other interesting things from the report:
- Manufacturing employment lost jobs for the first time since April 2021.
- Government employment increased by 46,000 people.
- Hospitality and retail accounted for around 200,000 of the new jobs.
- Warehousing, transportation, and information sectors all lost jobs.
A note from Townhall:
Overall, the labor force participation rate was essentially unchanged at 62.5 percent in February, but remains below the pre-pandemic rate of 63.3 percent seen in February 2020 — another refutation of President Biden's promise to "Build Back Better."
