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Good call on the economic calendar, very interesting.
If I could ask for just a little more clarification for what is confusing me.
If there are 100,000 more jobs than there were last month, how can less people have jobs when we just said that there are 100,000 positions that didn't exist last month.
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first off, unemployment (like i mentioned above) just (imperfectly) measured the % of the labor force that have jobs.
the labor force can change for a ton of reasons.
visit
www.bls.gov and go to unemployment rate to see how it is exactly calculated.
it takes into account discouraged workers (i forget the real term) and drops them out. i.e. if you have stopped looking for a job b/c you couldn't find one you are "not in the labor force"
that may be innaccurate but it is close enough.
basically, just know the UE rate is not a perfect measure. it is like a capacity measure that helps to tell whether we are near the point at which any additional growth will likely be inflationary (like capacity utilization).
to more directly answer your question, there aren't "100k more jobs than there were last month" there are "100k more jobs filled than were filled last month"
so right now, more people have jobs than had jobs last month (yet more people filed for first time unemployment benefits than they did last week/month than expected).
i hope this helps. let me know if i didn't answer your Q.
Barron
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Also, isn't the unemployment rate from a different survey (household versus payroll)?