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Jobs, jobs, jobs!

The U.S. labor market hit its stride in July, as employers added workers at a solid clip, the jobless rate matched a 16-year low and monthly wage growth picked up.

Highlights of Employment (July)

• •Payrolls rose 209k (est. 180k); May-June revisions added 2k jobs
• •Unemployment rate, derived from separate survey of households, fell to 4.3% (matching est.)
• •Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% m/m (matching est.) after 0.2% gain; up 2.5% y/y (est. 2.4%)

Job gains were broad-based during July, led by the largest jump in leisure and hospitality employment since September 2015, a move driven by gains at restaurants. Hiring also hit five-month highs in manufacturing and education and health services. The drop in the jobless rate reflected a 345,000 rise in employed people in the household survey, while the number of unemployed was little changed.

Meanwhile, in the frozen North:

Canada’s labor market continued its stellar performance in July, with the jobless rate falling to the lowest since before the financial crisis.

The unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent, the lowest since October 2008, as the labor market added another 10,900 jobs during the month, Statistics Canada reported from Ottawa. The total increase over the past year of 387,600 is the biggest 12-month gain since 2007.
…
Canada’s dollar fell 0.3 percent to C$1.2628 against its U.S. counterpart at 8:56 a.m. Toronto time. The greenback’s strength reflected a solid U.S. jobs report, with payrolls climbing by 209,000 and the jobless rate matching a 16-year low. Canada’s currency is still up 6.4 percent this year.

Two-year government bond yields rose 2 basis points to 1.25 percent, and the 10-year yield climbed 4 points to 1.93 percent. Traders were pricing in 64 percent odds of a Bank of Canada interest rate increase in October, versus 60 percent yesterday.
…
While the job gain in July was lower than the average over the previous few months, the numbers show a healthy labor market.
•The bulk of the gains over the past year have been full -time, with 353,500 jobs. In July, the economy created 35,100 full-time jobs while dropping 24,300 part-time jobs
•The full-time job gains means the total number of hours worked — a key determinant of income — are also accelerating. Total actual hours worked were up 1.9 percent in July from a year earlier, the fastest year-over-year gain since August 2015

I’m pleased to see that Shkreli is getting his just reward:

Shkreli, notorious for raising the price of a potentially life-saving drug by 5,000 percent, was found guilty Friday of defrauding investors in two hedge funds and in Retrophin Inc., a pharmaceutical company he co-founded.

He is now almost certain to go to prison. Shkreli faces as long as 20 years behind bars, although he’s likely to serve much less. U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto allowed him to return home and wished Shkreli well after the verdict was read. She said she would see him soon, though she hasn’t set a date for sentencing.

In the end, it was Shkreli’s lies to his investors that cost him his freedom, not his 2015 decision to jack up the price of an anti-parasitic drug. Prosecutors said Shkreli, 34, misled clients about the performance of his failing hedge funds, secretly used their money to start Retrophin, and then took $11 million from the drug-development company to repay them.
…
His attorneys sought to prove their case through cross-examination of government witnesses, claiming that Shkreli was an eccentric genius whose investors ultimately made millions of dollars — even if it took them years to recover their money.

“This is not a case where anybody was defrauded,” defense attorney Benjamin Brafman said in his closing argument to jurors.

I realize that his attorneys didn’t have much to work with, but I find the ‘everything worked out OK’ defence to be particularly obnoxious:

But no one said they lost money investing with the former pharmaceutical executive.

Shkreli’s lawyers urged jurors right from the start to keep an open mind because their client is “weird” and since then focused on a “no harm, no foul defense.”

Yeah, try the ‘no harm, no foul” defence when you’re a small-time bookkeeper taking a $50 advance on next week’s pay. See how far that’ll get you.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2017 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.