Today's employment numbers illustrate why the month-to-month change in employment doesn't deserve as much attention as it usually gets. One month ago, the stock market tanked when the August jobs number showed an unexpected decrease (-4000 jobs) for the month; now, that same number for August has been revised upwards to +89,000 jobs. I suppose the market will jump today on that "good news." If it does, I think I'll start analyzing short-term trading strategies to take advantage of the monthly overreaction.
Below are the charts showing 12-month changes (Sept. '07 vs Sept. '06). The private sector added 1.4 million jobs, and the federal government decreased by 22 thousand jobs.
Click to enlarge:
The source data (BLS tables B-1 and B-3) can be accessed at this page.
I'd be curious to see the graph for perhaps a five-year span. It might be instructive. One reason the monthly jobs report gets too much attention is that the numbers get pretty heavily revised. The other reason I'm not too concerned about the monthly figures is that economic fundamentals don't typically change on a month-to-month basis. From a policy and investment perspective, the year and longer view is more meaningful.
Posted by: JBL | 05 October 2007 at 11:14
Why listen to the Market when it is talking gobbledegook?
Any response to jobs numbers is unintelligible over the sound of investors trampling each other at the exit door of real estate and "alternative" investment vehicles.
As Michael Metz, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer Holdings said yesterday, the Market has stopped sending rational or intelligible signals.
Rational investors and students ought to see current strength in the stock market as money with no other place to go.
Chaos reigns in currency markets as well.
Strength in stocks in the face of an impending downturn in the domestic economy is, at best, Pig Latin.
Posted by: alan | 05 October 2007 at 13:20
S&P 500 ended up 96 basis points on the news. Start your program trading ,Steve.
It's not all that hard and will probably get easier. Just find a way to take an RSS feed, convert some numbers to XML with high and low limits, feed in to your broker and you can program trade with the big boys.
Posted by: Bob | 05 October 2007 at 16:59
Good news all around. The upward revisions were nice. Downward revisions (for the year ending in March 2007) were interesting. That may mean productivity was actually higher for that period. And, the final bit of good news, government jobs actually declined. Is that possible? I hope so.
Posted by: Kurt Brouwer | 05 October 2007 at 18:57