Horrific Hiring Numbers: Way Below Expectations In July; Revised Numbers Worse For May AND June; Hours Slip; Wages Slip; Labor Market Stuck In Quicksand; Almost 80% of 2013 Jobs Created Were Part-Time

Remember: for hiring, the magic number is 200,000. Anything below 200,000 is a "Fail."

Before we get to the most recent numbers, this update from ZeroHedge:

Obamacare full frontal: of 953,000 jobs created in 2013, 77%, or 731,000, are part-time.

When the payroll report was released last month, the world finally noticed what we had been saying for nearly three years: that the US was slowly being converted to a part-time worker society.

This slow conversion accelerated drastically in the last few months, and especially in June, when part time jobs exploded higher by 360K while full time jobs dropped by 240K. In July we are sad to report that America's conversation to a part-time worker society is not "tapering": according to the Household Survey, of the 266K jobs created (note this number differs from the establishment survey), only 35% of jobs, or 92K, were full time. The rest were... not.

Reuters is reporting:

U.S. employers slowed their pace of hiring in July but the jobless rate fell anyway, mixed signals that could make the U.S. Federal Reserve more cautious about drawing down its huge economic stimulus program.

The number of jobs outside the farming sector increased by 162,000, the Labor Department said on Friday.

That was below the median forecast in a Reuters poll of 184,000. Compounding that miss, the government also cut its previous estimates for hiring in May and June.

That is simply horrendous. Reuters didn't even bother reporting the revised numbers for May and June; that's bad.

On top of that, US "workers" are dropping out of the labor force, simply because there are no jobs to be had.

Wow, the entire article is bad news. Buried deep in the article:

Friday's report showed the average work week declined to 34.4 hours, while average earnings slipped 0.1 percent.

The report also showed 5.7 percent of Americans who had jobs in June could not get enough hours to qualify as full-time workers.

So, again, the average work week declined -- heading toward that all important 30 hours -- the ObamaCare threshold; and wages slipped.

Now, look at this in which the writer says the most important data points in the monthly jobs report: hours and wages:

It's the most important economic data point in the world. Financial markets will grind to a halt on Friday as the Labor Department releases the July nonfarm payroll report. While economists, on average, are looking for 175,000 jobs to be added and a one-tenth of a percent dip in the unemployment rate (to 7.5%), the real action could be buried several lines deeper.

"Anything with regard to hours — any sort of indication that average hourly earnings is starting to pick up," says Kevin Cummins, U.S. economist at UBS, in the attached video. While acknowledging that month-to-month data is volatile, he says the June print of 0.4% hourly wage growth marked a four-year high.

"That would suggest that there may be some structural changes in the labor market that are beginning to push up wages," he says. "Obviously that's good for the consumer, but it also suggests [there is] probably a little bit more inflation than what the Fed is expecting."

For the record, Cummins' team at UBS is looking for 195,000 total jobs, 200,000 private sector jobs and unemployment to be at 7.5%. Given the stronger-than-expected print of the ADP Private Sector Report on Wednesday, he says that could be an area of surprise for July. "If anything, in the last few months [the ADP report] has under-predicted the pace of the BLS's private sector jobs.

The Daily Ticker reports:

The White House is laser-focused too on seeing the jobs number go up. Since the labor market bottomed in 2010, the economy has added more than 6 million jobs, that's still the slowest job recovery after a recession since WWII. The unemployment rate is stuck well above 7%.

Heidi Moore, U.S. finance and economics editor for The Guardian, tells The Daily Ticker that President Obama's economic record over the past four years is pretty mixed.

Mixed? Throw in the trillions of dollars in stimulus money, and all the bankrupt solar companies, and it's hardly a mixed picture. 

 I assume Mr O'Bama has a golf date scheduled this weekend.