Peter Boockvar on January Jobs Report

Some insights below the surface of this morning’s Non Farm Labor report on January employment:

Payroll jobs grew by 227k, 47k more than expected. There were revisions that I’ll go back to September with which took off about 10k. The private sector added 237k jobs, 62k more than expected. The service sector contributed 192k while goods producing added 45k, 36k of which was in construction (good weather as ADP said?) and 5k was from manufacturing. In services, retail added 46k, more than the 34k in December which means seasonals had an impact as less people were hired for the holidays than seasonally adjusted for, therefore less were fired in January. The financial sector and leisure/hospitality also were the biggest additions to job growth.

Wage gains were disappointing, rising only .1% m/o/m and 2.5% y/o/y and weekly earnings were up also just .1% m/o/m and 1.9% y/o/y. Hours worked was unchanged at 34.4.

A so-so report has bond yields backing off a bit. Banks will not be trading on this today, however. They’ll be much more keyed-in to the news out of Washington about regulatory rollback. Read about that here in my latest op-ed: Dangerous Stability Threatens America’s Banks

Source:

Peter Boockvar
Managing Director, Chief Market Analyst
The Lindsey Group LLC