The Consumer Is Breaking, but Stocks Do Not Care for Now
The Mirage of Employment
Let us begin with a number that the financial media has chosen, with characteristic cowardice, to bury beneath triumphant headlines about a resilient labor market: 55,000. That is the average monthly job growth in the United States over the past six months. Fifty-five thousand jobs per month for an economy of 330 million people. And of those 55,000 jobs, 54,000 were in healthcare.
Read that again.
Of every job created in America over the past half year, 98 of every 100 were in a single sector—one that is structurally and inextricably dependent on government spending. Strip away the federal lifeline flowing through Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA, and the American labor market is essentially flatlined. This is not a strong job market. This is a government-subsidized jobs market wearing the costume of strength for the benefit of an incurious media and an oblivious Federal Reserve. The private, productive economy—the America that builds, manufactures, transports, and creates genuine wealth—is generating effectively zero net employment. Zero. And yet Jerome Powell, the most dangerous money printer to ever occupy the Eccles Building, sits serenely atop his throne, congratulating himself on maximum employment.
考慮到人口增長和企業銷售增長，但就業人數不增長，實際上很多行業就是等於變相裁員了。
