Jobs: Employment Report Not Good. Ie, Bad

Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 54,000 in May. This is the smallest gain since September and a fraction of the 125,000 jobs expected by economists polled by MarketWatch...

The civilian adult employment-to-population ratio remains at 58.4%: we have no labor-market recovery.
---DeLong

• May Payroll adds totaled only 54k, well below expectations of 165k and the private sector added just 83k jobs vs the consensus of 170k but the 83k compares closely to what ADP reported on Wednesday of 38k.
• Also, the prior two months were revised lower by 39k. The household survey said 105k jobs were added while the labor force rose by 272k, thus bringing the unemployment rate up to 9.1% from 9%.
• Manufacturing unexpectedly shed 5k jobs, the 1st time since last Oct.
• The services sector added 80k jobs, down from 213k in Apr as retail lost 9k jobs.
• The decline in gov’t jobs was almost all at the local government level.
• Average hourly earnings rose .3%, encouragingly .1% higher than estimated and the average workweek rose a touch.
• Discouragingly, the average duration of unemployment rose to 39.7 weeks from 38.3, the most ever.

---Boockvar