Thread by @DanielAlpert

#BLS #NFP Distracted Jobs Day to you.
Hard to pay attention with what is going on abroad.
Fed's move is known, and constrained by market reaction to the above.
A glance will be had at wage and income growth.
Headline number will likely underperform consensus.
But no one will care

Here we go:
Non farm payrolls up by 678,000
Private sector 654,000
Unemployment 3.8%
Boy was I wrong. More to come.
Hourly wages were flat though!

OK, there was a BIG catch-up in all the low-wage/low-hours jobs we had been missing for months. Over 360,000 jobs restored in retail, leisure and hospitality, education and healthcare and administrative and waste alone. This is why aggregate hourly wage growth was only a penny.>>

>>I tak back everything I said before this report. This was the pivot data we have been waiting for. The return of the low income service worker. LFPR and EPOP both rising as workers come off the bench after having exhausted COVID relief resources. The #GreatResignation is ending

Goods producing up smartly this month, too. Something for everyone. But a lot of it is on the tail of residential construction booming. A bit of a boost from oil and gas (given prices, unsurprising) and manufacturing across durables and non-durables.

But the big new is that the wage and income data stalled. You can see this vividly by looking at how average hourly wages FELL M/M in leisure and hospitality, education and healthcare, non-durable manufacturing & other services, as low wage workers returned.

Average weekly incomes across the board rose by 3/10ths M/M in February, but if we continue to add back jobs at the low income end of the range, this will actually decline in future months. It's just math.

Yet the same sectors that saw M/M declines in average hourly wages across the board, generally saw increases in the same for production and non-supervisory workers. This shows that it workers are coming off the bench for a combination of better wages AND RUNNING OUT OF MONEY.

It is that last part that makes this #BLS report so significant for the economy and for the Fed. There was slack after all, due to extraordinary buffers provided to workers during 2020-2021, now gone. And we now have folks taking up jobs again.
NO WAGE PRICE SPIRAL.
END

The @jobqualityindex #JQInstant readout shows that 62.89% of the jobs restored in February were in subsectors offering low-wage/low-hours employment. This is consistent with the erosion of hourly wage gains we saw in the average data.