Big Disappointment in Jobs Creation at +54,000; Unemployment Rate Jumps 9.1%

Still digging through though the numbers but the first glance is very disappointing.  A net 54,000 accounting for 83,000 private sector growth, versus 29,000 contraction in the public sector.  The estimate for May was about 175,000 a few days ago before the ADP report Wednesday.

Initial knee jerk in the S&P 500 is a drop from -0.3% in premarket to -1.0%ish.  ISM non manufacturing up at 10 AM.  S&P currently around 1300...

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Unemployment rate jumped to 9.1%.

Only positive on first glance is hourly earnings up 0.3%.  (Year over year growth 1.8%)

Average workweek flat at 34.4 hours.

Revisions from previous two months also decreased job growth by 39,000.

The all important labor force participation rate remains punk at 64.2%; the same figure for 5 months.  Hence the unemployment rate increase does NOT have anything to do with more people entering the work force (which would be a more benign explanation).  A more normal labor participation rate would be adding roughly 2% to the unemployment rate.  Please recall some 1M Americans have gone to the disability rolls in the past 2 years, which is obviously retarding the labor force participation rate at the margins.  [Apr 7, 2011: Nearly 1 in 20 Working Age Americans are on Disability, a Doubling versus 1990]

U-6: unemployed + marginally attached dropped from 15.9% to 15.8%.

Will revise this as I look through the numbers.  But considering the McJobs creation and birth death model job creation this is really a poor number.  Indeed if all 62,000 McJobs created fell in May - almost the entire net growth of jobs in the private sector was due to McDonald's.  The irony is great.

Full report from BLS here.