July Economics Report - looking bad

The first part of this months report showed quite a few things looking pretty upbeat.  Enough so, that one could wonder why I think the upswing will run out of steam before there is a true recovery.

But the jobs market analysis is pretty horrible.  The guy I trust to do the analysis talks like it is catastrophic, but I chock it up to being just one more month with good looking numbers on the surface and some pretty dismal numbers underneath.

First, the headline number the government always tries to push, 288,000 new jobs, isn't too bad.  In fact anything over 200,000 jobs should be progress.  But the manufacturing jobs, where the wealth is created, was only about 15,0000, and we need 20,000 plus jobs there every month.  We haven't gotten sufficient growth in manufacturing jobs in any of the past several months.

But what is worse is the number of part time jobs vs the number of full time.  The number of full time jobs actually went down this month. By more than 288,000. So, what has happened, by and large, is that a lot of people who used to work a full time job, are now working two part time jobs.

I do recommend Mish Shedlock's blog on Global Economic Trend Analysis for learning and tracking economic news around the world.  I don't recommend learning about war from him.  First, I don't think he understands war.  I suspect he just cannot get his arms around the idea that someone will kill you for having an opinion different that their own.  Second, while he seems to have a fairly realistic opinion of how brutal and under handed our own government can be, he seems to not understand just how much more brutal and dishonest other governments tend to be. Third, his opinions on the war in Ukraine are being formed by someone with an agenda to make Russia look good and Ukraine and The West look bad.

All in all, he is a genius about economics, but about war- not so much.