Part 1 - The real unemployment rate – August 6th
Bottom Line: It's always that case that there's a lot more to a monthly employment picture than the jobs added or lost and base reported unemployment rate. There were all kinds of goodies to unpack from Friday's report. Here are some keys in the report from July...
Headline unemployment rate 3.9% (down from 4% last month & from 4.3% year over year)
157,000 jobs added in July
Massive upward revisions totaling a positive 59,000 jobs rolled in from prior months for an all-in number of 216,000 jobs being added & once again uniting the government averages with the ADP Report averages
+2.4 million new jobs added year over year – Averaging over 200k new jobs per month for a full year!
Top industries for hiring:
#1 Professional and business services +51,000
#2 Manufacturing +37,000
#3 Healthcare +34,000
Now for the real unemployment rate once underemployed and long-term unemployed people are accounted for:
Actual: 7.5% down from 8.5% yoy
Other key takeaways:
1. When the long-term unemployed & marginally employed are factored in - the real unemployment is still nearly double the base reported rate
2. The forgotten folks include 1.4 million are long-term unemployed, 4.6 million are underemployed & 1.5 million are marginally attached to the workforce. 100,000 net improvement during the month
3. The labor participation rate remained 62.9%
Every layer of the onion that’s peeled back, the better this report looked. It was an outstanding month for jobs and that wasn’t the only good news. We’re now essentially at the lowest real unemployment rate we’re had since we started tracking the folks who aren’t counted in the government’s regular unemployment rate.
In part two we'll look at the demographics of the unemployed...