Back in January 2012 we noted [5] that while the market, and at the time the Fed, have been focused exclusively on the quantity of jobs created each month, a far more important aspect of the US economic recovery is the quality of newly created jobs. It took the Fed about three years to catch up but it finally did, and Yellen no longer cares so much about the headline NFP print or the unemployment number but rather how good the newly created jobs are, manifesting in the quality of wages and earnings. So what was the quality of seasonally-adjusted job gains in August? In a word: disturbing. Of the 142K jobs created, just under half came from the lowest paying jobs possible: education and health; leisure and hospitality; and temp-help. The best paying jobs, finance and information, added a whopping 4K jobs between them. Finally, about that much delayed US manufacturing renaissance: stick a fork in it - in August the number of manufacturing jobs created was exactly 0.
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