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Economy

With Crummy Jobs Report, The R-Word Is Far Closer

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Non-farm Payrolls increased a mere 18,000 jobs versus an expected 50,000 and the unemployment rate rose to 5.0% from 4.7% in November.  Hourly earnings rose 0.4%. It also looks like the the total number of people working fell 436,000 in December.  The November non-farm payrolls were actually revised higher to 115,000 from 94,000.

This follows suit with that Monster online reading yesterday.  If the labor market doesn’t hold strong then the economy isn’t going to be able to avoid the dreaded "R WORD" if this continues.  It isn’t like retail or credit is starting to show an help, and in fact they are getting worse and worse.

The DJIA futures were up slightly before this release, and after the release they fell almost 100 points.  The FOMC will now have to look harder at a 50-basis point cut whether it wants to or not, or so goes the trader mentality.

Jon C. Ogg
January 4, 2008

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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