After months of rock-hard gains in stocks, and an extended period of firming in the headline jobs data, some are noting that today's limpness in the jobs data is temporary, driven by an unexpected choke down of staffing in the porn industry. As Bloomberg reports [2], a big surprise in today's report was a 6% decline in the number of people working in the "motion picture and sound recording industries," which can be attributed to a shutdown in the porn-film industry that doesn’t reflect the underlying health of the economy.
[3]
It turns out that, as WaPo notes [4], the U.S. porn industry stopped working for a week after an actress tested positive for HIV. Once it became clear that no one else had the disease, work resumed. The one-week shutdown would affect the jobs numbers for the month of August but tells us nothing about the broader state of the U.S. economy. Had those 22,000 people been working, employment growth in August would have modestly beaten expectations.
Fed officials are probably blowing off this month’s weakness for that very reason. It seems we should all be pulling for a revival of the porn industry to raise the economy from its slumber.