What to Look for in Friday's Jobs Report

Tomorrow morning, at 8:30am EDT, every political and financial analyst will be focused on the Labor Department and its June Jobs Report. After a decent 1st Quarter of hiring, over the past two months, America's jobs' engine has stalled, creating just 77k and 69k jobs in April and May. Tomorrow's report will either confirm the economic slowdown or show that the last two months were an aberration and economic recovery remains on-track. Moreover, tomorrow's report will tell us a lot about the state of the Presidential race. A couple more reports like April and May and Obama has a very tough road to reelection. 

With the election just four months away, the next jobs' reports will be spliced, diced and parsed by partisans on both sides of the aisle. If you torture statistics long enough, they'll confess to anything. But, putting aside the spin, the numbers do provide a valuable glimpse of what's going on with the economy. Here are some items to watch.
April and May's jobs reports were widely seen as very bad economic news. Our economy needs to produce 125-150K new jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. Anything less than that, and our economy is losing ground. Even though April and May showed positive job growth, because the growth was half the needed number, the ranks of the unemployed increased. To reclaim the millions of jobs lost at the end of 2008 and throughout 2009, we'll need several months of 300k+ new jobs.
Most economists seem to be predicting tomorrow's report to show a net gain of around 90k jobs. ADP, the payroll firm, released a report today saying that the private sector created 176k jobs in June. This got the media and some Wall Street analysts excited that tomorrow's report may surprise on the upside. This is very unlikely.

Read more: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/07/05/what-to-look-for-in-tomorrows-jobs-report