Our Jobs Day Traditions

Good Morning.

The sun has risen on yet another Jobs Day, another monthly payrolls report that is The Street’s most widely-followed gauge for this economic era – the Jobless Recovery.

We get one of these each month but each one is the very most important Jobs report ever.

Because the recovery has always been a tightrope walk, a skate across a thin sheet of ice.  Especially on the employment front.  That now-famous Calculated Risk chart you’ve seen six million times comparing the jobs comeback of this recovery versus all others shall now be seen for the 6,000,001st time:

Bill McBride will be updating it again once we get the April number this morning.

Joe Weisenthal has been up since 3 o ‘clock this morning (assuming he ever went to bed at all last night).  These Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) release days are like Christmas for him and he gets 12 of them each year.  Here’s his ritual EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE THE BIG NUMBER post, which I must admit I get excited for as well.

It’s become something of a tradition.  We’ve got others:

Ben White of Politico’s Morning Money blog takes our unofficial estimates for the number on Twitter the day before.

Tyler Durden (Zero Hedge) warms up the crowd with a smattering of posts and tweets about why the number won’t matter anyway, we’re inexorably prison-raped no matter what it says.  The kids love that stuff.

I do my usual Catskills comic schtick, half caring what the report says as I’ve been schooled in the fact that these are always revised and that the trend is more important that any one month’s number.

The partisan hacks will cry out that the numbers themselves are manipulated to serve the White House, look at this maniac for example.  Nothing worse than political commentary painted and tarted up like a whore to give the appearance of an economic discussion.

The straitlaced journalists who aren’t up on the latest Jedi tricks will complain when the BLS server crashes and they get locked out.  This also happens every month as the entire world logs on at once to get the data first.

The number will be broadcast on TV and Radio but it will be mercilessly dissected on Twitter, StockTwits and the blogs.  Everyone is an expert now, and as Joe himself notes, it has gotten very intense.  Three years ago, the report would come out, we would blog the headline number and that would be that.

But tearing into it and parsing the data and searching for tidbits that might indicate a positive or negative sign is our new pastime.

And with that many bloodhounds combing over this thing, we are guaranteed to find plenty of points for both the bulls and the bears to like.

And with that, I’ll be turning my own attention to the rituals

This month the expectation is that we’ve added 163k jobs and that the unemployment level in April remained at 8.2%.  The market rallies hard on anything above 200k, anything below 125k and you can sell first, ask questions later.

Welcome to yet another Jobs Day.  Once again, the most important Jobs Day of your entire life.