Archive - Jan 2016 - Story

Transportation revised up thanks to UPS/Fedex revisions; December boosted by warm weather, January to reverse; Low oil prices benefiting the petrochemical sector; Consumer Spending remains strong

Earlier we gave a big picture explanation how the US can add 292,000 while average hourly wages actually decline. Below is a more nuanced answer, looking at the breakdown of jobs by industry in December.  It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that for another consecutive month, the well-paying jobs: mining and logging, wholesale trade, manufacturing, and information barely posted a net increase. At the same time, the poor paying jobs continued to soar.

Don't show Phil LeBeau this chart!

The good news - wholesale inventories are being worked off (falling 0.3% MoM in November - biggest drop since May 2013). The bad news - inventories are being worked off (crushing Q4 GDP hopes and Fed forecasts). The ugly news - Wholesale sales collapsed 1.0% MoM - the biggest drop in a year (leaving the spread between sales and inventories at a record high). The ugliest data of all - inventories-to-sales spiked to 1.32x - (the highest since 2008's crisis recession and as high as the worst in the 2001 recession!)

As we noted earlier, while the headline payrolls print blew away consensus estimate, printing above the highest expectations, there was a rather unpleasant number in the data: nominal average hourly wages actually dipped by 1 cent to $25.24.  What caused this? There are three reasons.

As we noted in the jobs preview, only a super strong number had any chance of prompting a market reaction, and sure enough, the just announced December print of +292,000 smashed expectations of +200K, surging from last month's upward revised 252K. So time for another rate hike, right? Not so fast: as usual, the fly in the ointment was a well-familiar one: wages simply did not grow, and with Wall Street expecting a 0.2% increase in average hourly wages, in December not only was there no wage growth, but in fact, average hourly earnings posted a tiny decline from $25.25 to $25.24.

This week is simply the worst we had in recent history for markets, RBS exclaims, the worst ever start to the year for The Dow, the worst since 1999 for S&P and the second-worst for credit since 2008. Worst still is, they think there’s more weakness ahead and that many fundamental risks will continue to haunt markets. Why? Simple! Investors drank too much policy kool-aid last year.

Now that the Fed has commenced its rate hike cycle, the jobs report suddenly takes on far less significance because only a massively "outlier" print will have an impact on Fed thinking, thinking which so far appears undented despite a raging manufacturing recession across the US. This means that the December jobs could be the "most important ever" only in retrospect.

"Saudi Aramco confirms that it has been studying various options to allow broad public participation in its equity through the listing in the capital markets of an appropriate percentage of the Company’s shares and/or the listing of a bundle its downstream subsidiaries."

• U.S. jobs market seen fairly healthy despite slowing economy (Reuters)
• China State Funds Said to Buy More Shares After Market Rout (BBG)
• Global Stocks Gain Some Respite (WSJ)
• U.S. Jobs Data Take on Added Importance With Markets in Turmoil (BBG)
• GOP Health Plans Are Works in Progress (WSJ)
• For economy czar of crisis-hit Venezuela, inflation 'does not exist' (Reuters)

U.S. STOCK INDEX FUTURES PAIR GAINS SLIGHTLY AFTER CHINA'S CENTRAL BANK SAYS IT WILL FURTHER LIBERALIZE INTEREST RATES - RTRS

Translated: even more devaluation + even less intervention = bad for risk.

The half-life of the latest "market supporting" intervention by the Chinese government: just about 12 hours.

As our situation in this country becomes more precarious, there are going to be far more flashpoints than anyone will be able to keep track of. It is inevitable that a fight between corrupt elements of the U.S. government and regular people will erupt.If internationalists were to get their way fully with the world and future historians write their analysis from a globalist perspective of the defunct American nation, they will probably say simply that our collapse was brought about by our own incompetence - that we were our own worst enemy. Yes, they would treat America as a cliché. They will of course leave out the destructive influences and engineered disasters of elitists, that would just complicate the narrative. My hope is that we do not prove these future historians correct, and that they won’t have an opportunity to exist.

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The problem of reaching limits in a finite world manifests itself in an unexpected way: slowing wage growth for non-elite workers. Lower wages mean that these workers become less able to afford the output of the system. These problems first lead to commodity oversupply and very low commodity prices. Eventually these problems lead to falling asset prices and widespread debt defaults. These problems are the opposite of what many expect, namely oil shortages and high prices. This strange situation exists because the economy is a networked system. Feedback loops in a networked system don’t necessarily work in the way people expect.