Todays employment report was somewhat ‘Goldilocks’ in nature.—a tic up in the unemployment rate with a modest amount of new job creation–unfortunately, for the most part, the new jobs were government and health care. Certainly the never ending deficit spending by the federal government is driving employment. The 4.1% unemployment rate is a positive ‘headline’ number for interest rates–the 10 year treasury is now at 4.32% which is down 4 basis points and down 16 basis points from the high earlier in the week. Next week we get CPI and PPI numbers on Thursday and Friday so we will see if September remains in play for a rate cut or if these numbers make the cut highly unlikely.
Our accounts are now bulging with cash as maturities on our fixed income issues hit big time this week. I will redeploy into new issues today–holding a modest amount back to buy a preferred and/or baby bond issue to continue a very slow increase in my allocation into these areas. Of course my goal is to increase my overall current yield without incurring capital losses (talk about my desire for goldilocks investments)–always searching for the perfect blend–of course it is impossible, but try just the same.
Probably a quiet day today–I have to believe that folks are taking a 4 day weekend and their minds are not on investing. As always (almost) I am working–slave on.
Some interesting comments here on Mario Gabelli,
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4122408-mario-gabelli-may-not-sell-stock-in-the-proposed-paramount-skydance-merger-report
I respect Tim’s views on the Gabelli funds. The comments in reference to the individual investor remind me of Jack Bogle and Warren Buffet.
Common sense and a respect for the hard working small investor. This is a passing generation. Now it’s more about worshiping the rock stars of the business world and dreaming you were them and thinking you deserve $20.00 an hour to make a Americano and have all the modern toys even if it means putting it on a credit card and going into debt.
May want to look at GGT E & G
Tim, be interesting to see what numbers would be if someone did a report of the number of retirees leaving the market compared to the numbers who are past retirement and the numbers for those re-entering the job market.
Final thought for the morning, I wonder what Monday will bring when people come back from vacation.
Tim; Today’s jobs reports once again is very “telling”. 70,000 Gov. jobs created out of the 206,000. Thats almost 34% jobs created to suck off the American Taxpayer. If you go back thru time it seems always in the top 3 of jobs created.
Leaving the politics aside, these job don’t contribute directly to positive GDP so this jobs report isn’t something you should get overly excited about.
Continued long term unemployment numbers continued to rise. There were pretty heavy downward revisions to previous numbers. Those are this month’s version of the ‘facts’.
“Downward revisions”
Wow, no kidding. They really juiced the last two months jobs numbers and hoped that would give the Fed cover to cut in Sept ahead of the election.
“Though June’s job total topped the 190,000 Wall Street was expecting, the devil was in the details. The government downwardly revised May’s swollen jobs growth to 218,000 from 272,000 and April’s from 165,000 to a very low 108,000. With these revisions, combined April and May jobs growth fell 111,000 from what the government previously reported and created a much softer employment picture.”
I was reading that almost all the job “gains” are part time jobs. Full time has been flat for over a year now with no real gains. I imagine a lot of this comes from people picking up two jobs to make ends meet and a large percentage of the full time jobs are government jobs which are being financed with deficit spending.
Gotta keep the plates spinning…
Chuck P and with continued deficit spending of 6-7% of GDP this trend will continue.
So, is the federal government actually creating new jobs (i.e., expanding the federal labor workforce) or are they filling vacant positions?