I'm looking at the numbers from the guys who should know..... insiders. Scary stuff. Insider buying rate is the lowest since 1993. Insider selling rate is the second highest in history, behind the year 2000, which was the top. In terms of buy-sell ratios, its never been this bad... not even close. Insiders are only buying $1 of stock for every $48 they sell. Not a good sign in my opinion. Any way to deduce "bullishness" from these numbers?
On top of …
"...Average hourly earnings in retail trade for March 2004 were $11.99 - DOWN from February by .05 cents and UP only 0.75% from March 2003. Average weekly earnings in retail trade for March 2004 were $364.50 - DOWN 1% from February of 2004 and UP just .09% from March 2003. Bottom Line: More service jobs, fewer hours worked, anemic if not falling hourly and weekly income levels for those service jobs. And this is GOOD news?..."
… from dailyreckoning.com The Jobs Report for March - Good News? By Dan Denning
London, England - The news broke last Friday - jobs have returned to the U.S... in droves. But perhaps not quite the way the mainstream press would have you think.
The big trend: service jobs. The surprising numbers: the average workweek fell by 0.1 hours to 33.7 hours. And average weekly earnings fell by 0.2% over the month to $523.70. Over the last twelve months, average hourly earnings grew by 1.8% and average weekly earnings increased by 1.5%. That's not exactly rip-roaring inflationary wage growth.Within the added jobs, here's the breakdown:
Construction: +71K
Retail Trade: +47K
Health Care/Social Assistance: +36k
Professional/Biz Services: +42k
Credit Intermediation: +11k
Food Services/Drinking Places: +27k
Government: +31k
In the year over year numbers, you see the same trend - more service jobs at lower wages, fewer manufacturing jobs at higher wages.
For example: in March 2003, there were 21,529,000 jobs that produced actual goods (not seasonally adjusted). 194k goods-producing jobs were lost in the last 12 months, for a March 2004 total of 21,335,000.
By contrast, service jobs were up in the same time from 107,619,00 in March 2003 to 108,466,000.
That's the big increase...847k service jobs in the last year. Remember though, average weekly hours in service-producing industries are down from 32.4 in March of last year to 32.1 in March of this year.
And here's the grisly, income-disinflationary truth:
Average hourly earnings in retail trade for March 2004 were $11.99 - DOWN from February by .05 cents and UP only 0.75% from March 2003.
Average weekly earnings in retail trade for March 2004 were $364.50 - DOWN 1% from February of 2004 and UP just .09% from March 2003.
Bottom Line: More service jobs, fewer hours worked, anemic if not falling hourly and weekly income levels for those service jobs.
And this is GOOD news?
Will The Fed Raise Rates?
The market's wisdom on the labor report is that it might justify a little Fed tightening... a chance for the Fed to painlessly extricate itself from the dilemma it's in.
But despite the jobs data last week, you still have three overriding realities: debt, lack of consumer income growth, over-leveraged housing prices, and no savings. Can the Fed really afford to raise rates in such an environment?
Greg Weldon thinks not. Forthwith, Here's an excerpt from Weldon's Money Monitor on Friday, on the idea that the Fed can now safely raise rates because the recovery is no longer "jobless":
"We have a problem with [this proposition].
"DEBT, a lack of consumer income, over-leveraged housing, and no savings. Okay, so we have 'FOUR' problems with thoughts of upward spiraling short-term interest rates... to us, they are all 'symptomatic' of the same bottomline dynamic as relates to debt.
"We have a problem with all that, when we note the EMPLOYMENT Report, and focus on the following factoids extracted from such:
Number of People Working Part-Time for Economic Reasons... up +296,000
Number of People Who Could ONLY Find Part-Time Work... up +80,000
Part-Time Workers... up +294,000... implying Full-Time Jobs FELL
Household Survey, Unemployment... up +182,000
Job Losers... up +284,000
Percent Unemployed Longer than 27 Weeks... 23.9%, up from 22.9%, with 1.988 million in this category during March, up +117,000 from February.
Persons Currently Want a Job, Cannot Find a Job... 4.843 million, a NEW HIGH, and up +97,000 from last month
Number Not in Labor Force... 75.9 million, a NEW HIGH, and up almost +900,000 from November.
Employment-to-Population Ratio... 62.1... DOWN from February's 62.2, and DOWN from the January rate of 62.4
"In other words, DESPITE all the self-gratuitous knee-slapping in the pop-media as relates to 1Q job 'creation'... LESS of the U.S. population has a job now than three months ago, AND more people are working part-time just to make ends meet.
"Fed tightening ???"
My guess: no rate increase from the Fed - at least, not yet.
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