Sometimes I will hear from readers who say that I talk too much about the government and politics in my column that is supposed to be about the economy and money. I actually agree with them. But until the government and politicians stop playing such a big of role in the economy and your money, I have no choice but to continue making it a focus of my attention.
Case in point. This past Friday US job numbers were announced for the month of April. According to the Department of Labor 175,000 new jobs were created, significantly below the 240,000 that were expected. At first glance, this could be a sign that the private sector may be slowing down. However, when you take a deeper dive into the numbers you actually find that most sectors of the economy produced about the same number of jobs as they have been averaging over the previous 12 months. The only sector that changed drastically was the number of government jobs created which dropped by a staggering 85%.
In fact, until this month the combination of federal state and local municipalities had been averaging over 55,000 of new jobs each month for the past year. Those jobs represented over a quarter of all jobs created and were the second largest job creating sector lagging just slightly behind health and education services, which also get large amounts of government funding.
This month however, only 8,000 government jobs were created. This 47,000 reduction in new government jobs just happened to be very close to the total difference between how many jobs were created this month vs. the previous 11 months. In other words, it is government jobs that have been propping up the historically low unemployment numbers we are experiencing, and those are by nature unsustainable, because government does not produce economic growth organically. It simply relies on the growth in the private sector to grow itself.
As if this example of the public sectors involvement wasn’t enough, the stock market’s reaction to this worse than expected jobs report is even more proof that we must be discussing the role government plays in our financial system.
You would think a drastic reduction in the total number of jobs created this month compared to last would be an indication of a slowdown in our economy, and would trigger a massive sell off on Wall Street. But in fact, the opposite occurred. The Dow Jones was actually up more than 500 points in the moments after the report was released.
Why would bad economic news be good for the markets? Because many investors believe reports like this might be the thing needed for another government entity, the Federal Reserve, to loosen the money supply and lower interest rates.
As my colleague and friend Aaron Pickert recently said in an interview I conducted with him on my podcast, the rules for investing have changed. Traditional economic indicators like corporate profit statements and consumer spending are just not the things that move the needle on the stock market anymore. It is now driven more by predictions of future government policies.
In my opinion, this is not a good thing at all. You can bend the rules of the free markets for a while, but the more you do it the more violent the recoil will be when the market finally says enough is enough.
I’m sure this may annoy or frustrate some of you, but given this is an election year and every politician out there is promising they have the solution to fix our economy, I can pretty much guarantee you there will be more Wednesday articles coming from me in the near future on this topic. It’s just too important to ignore.
(Past performance is no guarantee of future results. The advice is general in nature and not intended for specific situations)