Friday, February 3, 2023

Great new jobs numbers forthe start of 2023. And 2022. And 2021

We thought today's US jobs report for January would show things slowing down from the brisk pace of hiring. And we got......

Pretty remarkable stuff. So much for the recession talk.

But what I was even more interested about was regarding the annual benchmarking that comes with the January report, where added information from other, more refined jobs reports and population figures allow for year-long revisions. I had mentioned that previous indications showed there could be notable changes with this benchmarking, and that turned out to be true.

We started 2022 with over 500,000 more jobs than what was originally reported, and then 2022's job growth also ended up 311,000 higher than originally reported. Which means the Biden Jobs Boom has been even bigger than we knew, with more than 12 million jobs added in the first 2 years.

Now add the big numbers from January's report, and we are past 12.5 million jobs added since the end of 2020. And while that will likely alarm the fearers of inflation, we're not necessarily seeing that translate into wages spiking, even as the job market seems near capacity.

So while some may fear that this entices the Fed to tighten even more (and it's a reason Wall Street was down today despite such great jobs news), the lack of inflation tells me they should still back off. And that they should try to continue some version of this great jobs market as long as they can. Jobs and wages for everyday people are good things, no matter what the oligarchs try to tell us.

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