Rosenberg Daily - Jobs Numbers Summary

For the fourth month in a row nonfarm payrolls surprised the consensus to the downsrde — not to mention the ADP survey (which has overstated the official data by an average of 65k over this time frame). The 80k headline was a good 20% shy of Street forecasts and dragged the average tally for the second quarter to a mere 75k, nearly 70% slower than the 226k average gain in Q1 and the most sluggish performance since the third quarter of 2010 (so don't fret — that was the quarter that touched off QE2). This continues to go down as the most tepid recovery on record. In fact, even though the recession technically ended in mid-2009 with the help of the govemment defibrillator, I wouldn't even hazard to call this a recovery. What is typical for this part of the cycle is for payrolls to be up more than 240k in the 36th month into the expansion. That more or less puts 80k into a proper context. Something else to ponder is that 36 months into an alleged recovery, employment is still 3.6% below the prerecession peak. Scouring the historical record in the post-WWII era shows that it generally takes no longer than 25 months to recoup the job losses suffered in the recessionary phase. At the rate we are going so far this year, that fateful day won't happen until March 2015.