Surprise drop in jobs in January?!?!?!?

A surprise to whom, you might ask? A surprise to the economists surveyed by Briefing.com. I would like to see their economists’ consensus opinion on the likelihood of the sun rising tomorrow. The headline would read something like, “In surprise move, Sun rises.” Wouldn’t you love to bet on the outcome of coin flips against these geniuses?

CNN/Money reports on the story today in “Surprise Drop in Jobs in January.” It says:

The report also showed the average hours worked in the private sector declined in January to 33.7 hours from 33.8 in December. That drop, coupled with only a narrow 4-cent gain in the average hourly wage, resulted in the first drop in weekly wages since April.

Here is a fact that was ignored for the last 5 years. Housing prices are very dependent on wages. It turns out that if you remove the avalanche of currently exploding adjustable-nodoc-negative amortization-terrible idea loans from the equation, that people use something called “earnings” to pay for their homes. Using this cutting edge theory, it might be possible to see that 20% home price increases coupled with 4% wage increases might cause an imbalance. And you might be able to forecast that falling wages and employment might further harm the housing market. (just for fun I calculated that 18 years of such an imbalance would have wages doubling and home prices rising 26-fold - that would give the average family about $100,000 per year with which to purchase a $6 million home. 5% interest on $6,000,000 is $300,000 per year.)

Hopefully this surprise increase in unemployment was caused by the firing of lots of economists, and will be reversed soon by the hiring of lots of coin flippers, or an infinite number of chimpanzees.