◼ A polar vortex of “unexpected” failure sends icy winds of pathetic job growth and workforce collapse howling through the December jobs report... - John Hayward/Human Events @Doc_o
The real problem here is the still-dismaying number of people who insist on looking for work. Knock it off, you guys, and drop out of the workforce already. You’re making President Obama look bad.
◼ People Not In Labor Force Soar To Record 91.8 Million; Participation Rate Plunges To 1978 Levels - Zerohedge
◼ Record Number of Women Not In Labor Force - CNS News
◼ Sessions: 'For Every One Job Added, Nearly 5 People Left the Workforce' - Weekly Standard
◼ Labor force participation rate, welcome back to 1978 - Doug Powers/Michelle Malkin
◼ MEDIA AGAIN HUMILIATED AFTER HYPING UNRELIABLE ADP JOBS NUMBERS - John Nolte/Breibart
More terrible economic news hit the struggling American people today when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that only 74,000 jobs were created in December, the fewest number in five years. The unemployment rate dropped from 7% to 6.7%, but that is due only to the disheartening fact that 525,000 of the unemployed stopped looking for work. As a result, the labor force participation rate dropped to its lowest point since 1978. Still, President Obama enjoyed a week of celebratory news about job creation thanks to our objective, unbiased, not-at-all liberal media once again hyping the notoriously unreliable jobs report from ADP. The result of this, naturally, is to give Obama a couple of good news cycles, but to do so based on numbers the media know are frequently wrong and just as frequently overstate the number of jobs created.
Today's BLS jobs report -- the real jobs report -- is unqualified in its awfulness. And yet...
◼ El-Erian to Bloomberg TV: Jobs Data Between Puzzling and Worrisome - Investment Watch
“It is very surprising. It is somewhere between puzzling and worrisome. Puzzling because it is such a strange number – the 74,000 jobs that were created — even if you add in the revisions from last month. It is still half of what consensus was, and it is inconsistent with lots of other data. But it is also worrisome and I think we have to remember that. Because if you look within the report, you get some pretty worrisome things in terms of what is happening to labor participation. We’re back to levels that we haven’t seen since February ’78. Long-term unemployment still stuck 37%. So we’re going to learn a lot more about what is the impact of the weather, how much of this is real, how much of this is temporary. It is a shocker, to put it mildly.”
