Just a brief overview of thoughts on the big jobs report from this morning:
- Non-farm payrolls came in at 169K vs expectations of 175K.
- June and July were revised lower by a total of 74K.
- The unemployment rate fell to 7.3%, but was largely due to reduced labor force participation.
- Government jobs were up 17K.
- Private payrolls rose 152K.
- Wage growth was up 0.2%.
- We’ve averaged 154K jobs since 2010. Today’s report was slightly better than average.
Overall, I’d say this report was more of the same. You’ll read the same headlines we’ve seen for years about how weak the report was when the reality is that we’ve averaged 95K monthly job gains since 1990 so 169K is really nothing to get too worked up over. We’re not going backwards and that’s good news even if the details of the forward progress don’t look ideal.
Mr. Roche is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Discipline Funds.Discipline Funds is a low fee financial advisory firm with a focus on helping people be more disciplined with their finances.
He is also the author of Pragmatic Capitalism: What Every Investor Needs to Understand About Money and Finance, Understanding the Modern Monetary System and Understanding Modern Portfolio Construction.
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