Great News! August Jobs Numbers Miss; Stocks Aim For Moon Shot

Bad news is still good news on Wall Street.

According to the impeccable source of all financial excitement, Yahoo! News,

The August jobs report is out and it’s a miss.

The U.S. economy added 156,000 nonfarm payrolls in August while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.4%, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists were looking nonfarm payrolls to grow by 180,000 in August while the unemployment rate was expected to hold steady at 4.3% near a post-crisis low. The BLS noted in its report that Hurricane Harvey had “no [discernible] effect” on the employment data for August.

Wage growth was also a disappointment, with average hourly earnings rising 0.1% over the prior month and 2.5% over last year. Earnings were expected to rise 0.2% over the prior month and 2.6% over the prior year. A rise in wages is seen by economists as portending an uptick in inflation, which has disappointed this year.

The rest of the story is here.

After ten years of the most tepid "recovery" on record, and despite $14 trillion of magic money creation by the central banks of the developed countries (adding in China, it's more like $18 trillion), poor employment data is still greeted with smiles by stock jockeys, because it means the economy is not really recovering and the Fed and other globalist central banks cannot realistically raise interest rates.

That means the punch bowl will be refilled with easy credit and the bubbly stock market can advance to every higher levels of insanity.

Forget that the average P/E of S&P 500 stocks is four standard deviations above the norm, that government pension shortfalls threaten the retirement of millions of aging Americans. Forget that wages have been stagnant for 17 years running. Just buy more stocks and everything will turn out just fine.

It's madness. Nothing, absolutely nothing will change until the day comes when it all changes at once. But that day may still be years away because the central banks and government number crunchers will see to it that the veil is never removed from the eyes of ordinary people who will be taxed and regulated into the ether.

There are no jobs. Party on!

At the Close, 8/31/17:
Dow: 21,948.10, +55.67 (+0.25%)
NASDAQ: 6,428.66, +60.35 (+0.95%)
S&P 500: 2,471.65, +14.06 (+0.57%)
NYSE Composite: 11,875.69, +70.62 (+0.60%)