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McJobs, McJobs, McJobs!

Data released Friday show a labor market that’s finally beginning to create new jobs, while at the same time offering little evidence that’s translating into higher incomes for workers as wage growth and hours worked slump.
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Still, wage data showed underlying weakness that may complicate matters for Bank of Canada policy makers. Average hourly wages for permanent employees increased 1 percent in January from a year earlier, the slowest pace of growth since at least 2003. Hours worked also fell 0.8 percent from a year earlier.
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Most of the gains came from two categories — a 20,500 increase in finance, insurance, real estate and leasing and another 16,400 in business, building and other support services — and for men aged 25 to 54, with the increase of about 30,000 the largest in more than two years.

It was split between 32,400 part-time positions and 15,800 full-time jobs.

There’s a fascinating story about Nav Sarao, the Flash Crash scapegoat, that shows once again that trading and investment management are two completely different things:

After four months of dead ends, his legal team struck a deal with the authorities: If the U.S. Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission agreed not to oppose a reduction in bail to 50,000 pounds, the firm would act as a bounty hunter, taking on responsibility for tracking down the missing millions on the condition that its fees be paid if it did.

They were going down a rabbit hole. A review of Sarao’s investments from 2005 to the present day, based on dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of documents, reveals another twist in an already remarkable story. Navinder Sarao, the trading savant accused of sabotaging the world’s financial markets from his bedroom, may himself have been the naïve victim of what his lawyers portray as a series of cons that stripped him of almost every cent he earned.

Sarao declined to comment for this article. His lawyer, Roger Burlingame of Kobre & Kim in London, told a U.S. judge in November that all of the defendant’s assets “have been stolen.” Sarao invested in ventures from which he, the law firm and the CFTC had been unable to recover the funds, Burlingame said. “Basically, he has some extraordinary abilities with respect to pattern recognition and certain sorts of mathematical abilities, but he has some fairly severe social limitations.”

The story also illustrates the regulatory penchant for going after the easy marks for trivial infringements of arbitrary rules while ignoring the real crooks in the industry.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2017 at 10:33 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.