Jobs — It's a lot of work to measure work across an entire economy, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics gets it done every month. Last month’s job report, officially known as “the Employment Situation Summary”, to sound way fancier than it is, just dropped and the best way to describe it has to be “underwhelming.”
The headline figure, being the number of nonfarm payrolls added, clocked in at 210,000, well below the 535,000 expected by economists. While economists being wildly wrong isn’t anywhere close to a shocker, the fact that November’s number was the lowest growth since employment actually contracted in December 2020 was a bit of a surprise. But, to put things in context we have to a dig a bit deeper.
The Fed’s goal of “maximum employment” is one of things that everyone knows what it is in theory but not in practice. Figuring out exactly when we reach max employment is an elusive endeavor, but one thing’s for sure, being that we’re definitely getting close. Unemployment fell further, in the face of low hiring growth, to 4.2% from 4.6% prior. Before the pandemic began, unemployment sat at 3.5% (Feb’ 20), but many argued at the time we were past the natural rate of employment and warned against causing an overheating of the economy.
Now, unemployment sits at 4.2% while labor force participation grew to 61.8%, still slightly lower than the 63.3% seen before the pandemic. It’s a tricky situation, especially given that both October and September’s reports were revised upward by a combined 82,000 jobs, meaning economists were even more wrong than previously thought.
DiDone — 2021 has been a year for all of us, but perhaps no-one else is feeling the pain quite like Chinese tech stocks.
You might remember DiDi — there was a solid week long stretch back in July where we wrote about them every single day. The Uber of China IPO’d on June 30th in a fervor of excitement, uncertainty, and communism. Given DiDi is a poster child of Chinese tech being able to compete head on with that of the U.S., the CCP was not even close to happy that the firm chose to list in New York. From banning app downloads to opening every kind of investigation imaginable, it is safe to say that DiDi was duly punished.
Commensurately, shares were punished too. Shares are down a brutal 57% since IPO as of Friday when shares fell another 22.2% on news of a delisting. In a presumed attempt to save themselves from the wrath of the CCP, DiDi announced it will delist from the NYSE “immediately” and begin the process of listing in Hong Kong.
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