The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that in August the United States economy only generated 156K new jobs. Consensus expectation by leading economists predicted that 180k new jobs would be created by in the US in the month of August. This is a miss of 24k jobs or 15%. This is bad enough but we saw the jobs numbers revised down in June and July as well. The number of new jobs reported for June was revised down from 231k to 210k & 209k to 189k for July. This totals downward revision of 41k. Other vital labor statistics showed that the reported unemployment rate remained constant at 4.4% and the labor force participation remained at a very depressed 60.1%. Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 3 cents to $26.39, after rising by 9 cents in July. Over the past 12 months, average
hourly earnings have increased by 65 cents or 2.5 percent. What does this mean for investors?
