Latest Jobs Report looks good w/ headline numbers blowing away expectations, but the devil is in the details - here's a plain-English thread on why this is a very troubling report🧵... 
First the headlines:
Sep nonfarm payrolls jump 336k; Unemployment rate flat at 3.8%; Labor force participation rate remains depressed at 62.8%; Those not in the labor force rose to roughly 5 million more than pre-pandemic - this is artificially pushing down unemployment rate:
Sep nonfarm payrolls jump 336k; Unemployment rate flat at 3.8%; Labor force participation rate remains depressed at 62.8%; Those not in the labor force rose to roughly 5 million more than pre-pandemic - this is artificially pushing down unemployment rate:
There are various ways to account for the people missing from the labor force (4.5-5.4 million) and doing so yields an unemployment rate between 6.3 and 6.8%
Where were the jobs added in Sep? 22% came from government - an unsustainable increase; remember that private sector workers have to support those public sector jobs:
What kinds of jobs were added? Entirely part-time (+151k); in fact, we LOST full-time jobs (-22k); last 3 months have seen part-time jump 1.2 million while full-time fell 700k (most since lockdowns); double counting of multiple jobholders (123k) was 37% of job gains...
Who has the jobs? Let's break it down a few ways; first, foreign-born workers are already back to pre-pandemic trend while native-born workers have never recovered; since Mar '22, jobs disproportionately went to the foreign born, which brings up another important point...
Something broke in the labor market in Mar '22; the household and establishment surveys began to diverge and full-time job gains slowed dramatically; this continues today as nonfarm payrolls (establishment) jumped 336k in Sep, employment level (household) only rose 86k:
But back to who has the jobs, it's college grads, in spades: unemployment rate 2.1%, employment level 63 million (inline w/ pre-pandemic trend), emp-to-pop ratio 71.9%, and their earnings are outpacing inflation - why would you give this group a student loan bailout?
Lastly, the loss of full-time jobs and their replacement w/ part-time work is helping slow wage growth, which is then negative after adjusting for inflation - real weekly earnings fell dramatically until Jun '22 and have moved sideways since:
TLDR: people supplementing incomes w/ part-time jobs are goosing the headline numbers while underlying economic fundamentals remain weak; people absent from workforce pushing down unemployment rate; earnings not keeping up with inflation; don't expect the job gains to last...
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