The economy shed 23,000 jobs in July. Economists expected it to add 83,000. That's a miss of 106,000 jobs. Somewhere a retail trader just refreshed his Robinhood app and whispered "this changes everything" into the void.
The unemployment rate was supposed to hold at 4.2%. It did not hold at 4.2%. But don't worry. Some guy on Twitter with a laser-eyed profile picture already has a seventeen-part thread explaining why this is actually bullish for his dogsh*t microcap position.
Nonfarm payrolls. That's the metric. Not farm payrolls. Those don't count. If you work on a farm you're invisible to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You could be out there harvesting corn in 95-degree heat and the government treats you like a f*cking ghost. But lose 23,000 jobs at enterprise SaaS companies and suddenly it's a national emergency.
The Dow Jones consensus got this one wrong by 106,000 jobs. That's the economist equivalent of showing up to a wedding and congratulating the groom on his divorce. Just a complete misread of the room. But they'll be back next month with another forecast and everyone will treat it like gospel because we have the memory of a goldfish with a head injury.
Retail traders will spend the weekend reverse-engineering what this means for their portfolios. They'll draw lines on charts. They'll calculate correlations. They'll build Monte Carlo simulations in Excel. Then Monday morning they'll open their accounts and realize the market didn't move because none of this sh*t matters and it never did.
The BLS will revise these numbers in six weeks and nobody will notice because we'll all be pretending to care about whatever jobs number comes out that month instead.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
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