January Jobs Shocker: Payrolls Explode By 353K, Double The Expected And Higher Than All Estimate As Wages Surge

Well, we did warn readers that anyone hoping for a negative print in an election year would be disappointed, and moments ago the BLS proved us right.

With Wall Street expecting a continued declines in the pace of monthly growth, and consensus looking for a decline from last month’s 219K print to 185K, the BLS decided to once again show logic and common sense who is boss, and damn your mass tech layoff torpedoes…

Dear @BLS_gov, since you have trouble finding actual data, we’ve made it easy for you – here are the layoffs announced in the past few months:

1. Twitch: 35% of workforce
2. Hasbro: 20% of workforce
3. Spotify: 17% of workforce
4. Levi’s: 15% of workforce
5. Zerox: 15% of…

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 31, 2024

… it reported that in January the US created a ridiculous 353K jobs…

… double the 185K expected, and higher than than the highest forecast estimate, which as a reminder was 300K. In fact, as shown below, this was a 4-sigma beat to expectations…

… and putting the beat in the context of the past year, it was an absolute blowout:

What is notable is that once again there was a huge dispersion between the Establishment and Household Surveys, and while the former indicated an increase of 353K, the latter reported a drop in Employment of 31K!

Clearly none of that mattered to the BLS which had just one mission: to make the economy look double super good-good, and it wasn’t just payrolls which blew away expectations, the unemployment rate also slipped, staying at 3.7%, vs expectations of an increase to 3.8%. That said, Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.6 percent), adult women (3.2 percent), teenagers (10.6 percent), Whites (3.4 percent), Blacks (5.3 percent), Asians (2.9 percent), and Hispanics (5.0 percent) showed little or no change in January.

More notable was the sudden jump in wages, with the BLS reporting that average hourly earnings increase 0.6% from December (and double the 0.3% estimated increase), rising 4.5% YoY, also blowing away estimates of a 4.1% increase.

But, in keeping with the endless gimmicks by the BLS, this is not because of an actual wage increase but because people literally worked less (the denominator in the average hourly earnings equation) as the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased by 0.2 hour to 34.1 hours in January and is down by 0.5 hour over the year, down to the lowest level seen in the depths of the covid crisis.

Developing

Developing.