Cyrillic Partners

The U.S. Labor Department reports that the job market is hot, hot, hot, with the total number of new jobs added in October at 166,000. That’s the fastest labor market expansion in five years. Good news, certainly, for any soon-to-be graduates

Usually that would be good news for the economy too, but Wall Street didn’t seem to much care. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up just slightly Friday, not nearly enough to compensate for Thursday’s beat down. So what sticks out here? Well most experts seem to think the Labor Dept.’s numbers are a little high. They cite the anomalous increase in administrative jobs. Others point to the way the Department estimates new jobs from the number of new companies being created.

This argument seems especially salient to me. The number of employees needed to start a company has decreased dramatically thanks to new technology developments. You can start an Internet business today with just one person, for example. It may be time to update the way those estimates are made.

Oh yeah, then there’s this, excerpted from the NYT:

And a separate survey of households, also conducted by the Labor Department, presented a very different picture of the job market. It showed that fewer Americans over all were employed in October. The labor force shrank by 211,000 jobs, and 465,000 Americans said they were no longer working.

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