Trump Lauds Job Statistics He Once Impugned – Ep. 234

The Peter Schiff Show Podcast

I guess you could say a good jobs report is all in the eye of the beholder And when it comes to President Trump's eyes, he is now beholding an excellent jobs report Whereas a candidate, similar reports were described by Trump as phony, a hoax I have a lot more sympathy for Candidate Trump than I do for President Trump Now President Trump is trying to pretend that the jobs numbers that he used to be so critical of Are now reflecting what a great job he is doing as President When there's really no difference between the metrics of this job report and the ones we got under Obama With probably one exception And that is in the number we got is better than expected, though not as good as some had hoped, given the very strong ADP number we got earlier We got a surge in manufacturing jobs there was also a bump in construction jobs But I am very suspicious of the manufacturing jobs I know a lot of American manufacturers are really trying to curry favor with Donald Trump early in his Presidency And this could all be some Trump-related window dressing This is a long trend of hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs And I don't think this one blip necessarily means that trend has changed I wouldn't get too excited; it is a good thing to be creating goods-producing jobs, manufacturing jobs I'm not criticizing that But the question is, is it sustainable, is it real, or is it simply some smoke and mirrors Orchestrated selectively to make Trump look better early on So certain companies can get what they want from Trump when it comes to tax reform, or other issues where these companies may have a vested interest Let me go over the actual February Non-Farm Payroll numbers: The consensus was 200,000 jobs; 227,000 was the number created in January Most of that was prior to Trump becoming President, though subsequent to his election So we did 227,000 jobs in January and they actually revised that up to 238,000 jobs We did 235,000 in February, so actually slightly less, at least based on the initial estimate of jobs created in the prior month Unemployment rate did fall slightly from 4.8% to 4.7% and labor force participation inched up from 62.9% to 63% as more Americans re-enter the labor force Average hourly earnings, though, which were expected to rise .3% only rose .2% But they did revise the prior month from .1% .2% So I guess that was about a push .2% is not much of an increase in wages, especially when prices are rising 2-3 times as fast Remember January CPI was up .6 - triple the rate that wages are up The average work week remained the same at 34.4% As I said, what was a little bit different, though was the complexion of the jobs We did create jobs in manufacturing, for a change