Friday stocks retreated sharply as a “good news is bad” market develops.
The Employment Report on the surface was great with 295K new jobs vs 230K expected & prior was readjusted sharply downward from 257K to only 239K.
The unemployment rate fell from 5.6& to 5.5%. Scratch below the surface and things weren’t that great.
Estimates for wage growth disappointed as it fell to only 0.1% vs 0.5% expected & prior 0.5%; the majority of jobs added were to the lowest category despite Labor Secretary Thomas Perez assertion “the quality of jobs is going up”; a befuddling data point from the BLS which showed only 1900 energy sector jobs lost which defies reality; the labor participation rate fell to only 68.2