US Economy Is Running Out of Jobs and Excuses (Video)

Last week, the March jobs data finally began to match the rest of the terrible economic data in America. While analysts are blaming the lower-than-expected non-farm payroll numbers on poor weather, the employment picture is actually worse than the first quarter of last year when the “polar vortex” swept through the country. In his latest video blog, Peter Schiff dissects all of this data and explains what it means for Federal Reserve policy going forward.

Highlight’s from Peter’s video

“I’ve been saying it would only be a matter of time for the jobs numbers to fall back down in line with everything else. That is what has happened today, at least with the March numbers. Of course, before the numbers were released, they were already trying to pre-blame this on the weather. But no matter who you slice it, this report was terrible, and it’s not because of the weather…

“Analysts had been expected 247,000 jobs created in March… The lowest estimate was 200,000. Even the people that thought it would be a bad number, still thought we’d get another 200,000… The actual number was 126,000 jobs… That is the fewest number of jobs that we’ve created since December of 2013. That means we did better in the polar vortex, January, February, March of 2014. This was worse than those numbers.

“To add insult to injury, they went backwards and took 67,000 jobs away from the last two months. Meaning, they went backwards and revised the previous estimates of job gains so those gains were not as robust as they were originally reported. In fact, if you take the last three months in total, the average of those three months is now below 200,000 jobs per month…

“The labor force participation rate edged back down a tenth to 62.7, matching its record low. At least, the record low in modern times… [You have to go back to] 1978 to find a labor force participation rate this low. But of course back in the 1970s, that was only when women began to enter the labor force… If you look at the labor force participation rate for men, it’s never been this low in the history of the country. In fact, if you also look beneath the headlines, for every 1 person that found a job in February, more than 2 people left the labor market…

“The number of Americans that are no longer working rose to a record 93.17 million Americans… 277,000 left the labor force…

“Another problem statistic is that among those that did get jobs in March, they were over 55. All of the job gains went to workers 55 and older. Workers who are younger than 55 actually lost jobs in March…

“About 70% of the jobs that were created were in retail, in health care, education, hotels, restaurants. Many of these jobs are temporary jobs. Many are part-time. Most of them are low-paying. So again, a very, very weak jobs reports…

“Finally, a report that’s so weak that it may confirm all of the other weak economic data that people have been ignoring. Remember, people have been saying, ‘Yes, these numbers are weak, but the jobs market is still strong. So I’m not going to worry about all this the weak data, because we can still hang out hat on these strong jobs numbers.’ Well, there’s nothing to hang your hat on any more, except to blame it on the weather…

“The last time Janet Yellen spoke she basically… said that rate hikes are contingent on further improvement in the job market. What has happened to the job market since she made that statement? The job market has deteriorated substantially. Not only have we revised lower the prior two months… Now we have the worst non-farm payroll report since December 2013. Was the Fed raising rates back then? No, they were doing quantitative easing back then…

“I think it’s only going to get worse. Remember, a lot of the jobs were created in 2014 on the anticipation of the economic recovery… I think a lot of these jobs are going to go away. A lot of the bartenders and waiters that got hired in 2014 will get fired in 2015…

“The Fed is at some point going to have to acknowledge that the US economy is not as strong as it thought. I can already hear the calls and justification for more stimulus, for QE4, whether they call it that or not. Everybody is going to agree. The problem is that we just didn’t do enough stimulus. It was working, we got this recovery going, but it just didn’t have enough power… to achieve escape velocity… We just need a bigger round of stimulus, Paul Krugman style…

“This is going to be the lethal round. This is going to be the overdose of QE, because the crisis that’s coming is going to be a dollar crisis. The dollar was down 1% or so in a thin holiday trading session… But really, the decline of the dollar is only just getting started. Whether it’s going to continue next week, or it’s going to have to wait a little longer while people figure this out…”

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