Penelope Pussycat might not be the most iconic of Generation X cartoon characters, but she does stand alone in her capacity to confuse. Penelope, a lovely black and white fluff ball of a cat, had a seemingly inescapable penchant for finding herself the unsuspecting wearer of an unnatural and very skunk-like white stripe. A stripe which would of course render her irresistible to the resolutely romantic, albeit malodorous, Pepé le Pew. And so with the stage set, the chase would ensue to Penelope's long-suffering protestations.
As is the case with all things in love and war, complications arose. There were exceptions, moments when the shoe would find itself on the other foot and Penelope became the pursuer and the dapper, prancing skunk the pursued. This half-century long chase has led some skeptics to ask whether Penelope was not in fact just playing hard to get all along.
The recent string of robust job gains has led others to ask whether workers have finally broken through to the stronger position of pursued as well, with employers in the hunt for their increasingly valuable skill sets.
It's even rumored that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen's favorite gauge of labor market strength is the so-called ‘quits rate' which rises in lockstep with the percentage of workers who feel confident enough to tell their employers where they can put their jobs (the sun doesn't shine there). Hence the hysteria when the quits rate ticked up to 2.2 percent in December, the highest in over eight years. The conclusion: workers had finally gained the upper hand.
Suffice it to say, the party didn't last for long. The quits rate retreated back to 2.0 percent in January (the data series is quite lagged and that is the most recent data on hand) and other forward-looking indicators suggest momentum is waning.
A superficial glance at the headline data is misleading on several levels. For starters, at 195,000, the number of jobs cranked out by the private sector slid in at 38,000 fewer positions than the past six-month average. Dig deeper, though, and you'll note that the 4,000-job downward revision to January's numbers masked more troublesome figures. The numbers behind that number: Temporary employment was revised downwards by 22,000 while government jobs were revised up by 23,000.
