Breitbart Business Digest: The New Playbook for Reading Friday’s Jobs Report

Friday’s Jobs Report Needs a New Decoder Ring

Wall Street expects tomorrow’s April jobs report to show a gain of around 55,000 nonfarm payrolls, with the unemployment rate holding at 4.3 percent and average hourly earnings up 3.8 percent year over year. If the headline payrolls number comes in anywhere near that consensus, expect to hear words like “anemic,” “stumbling,” and “stalling.” Here’s why you should ignore them — and how to read the report instead.

Those words betray a set of assumptions about how the labor market works that no longer apply — and arguably haven’t applied for some time now.

The old playbook treats low payroll numbers as evidence of economic weakness. It’s partly rooted in an approach to economics often associated with John Maynard Keynes that expects the economy to be persistently plagued with inadequate demand for labor, goods, and services. And, more concretely, it