Photo by Razvan Chisu

I always caution not to make too much of a single report or single month’s data, but I think we can look at the July report and say it was unambiguously bad news. The job growth number for the month wasn’t bad at 73,000, but with the sharp downward revisions to the prior two months’ data, the average for the last three months was just 35,000. That is bad.

But it gets worse. Health care accounted for 55,400 of the new jobs created in July. It accounted for 142 percent of the job gains over the last three months. That means the economy outside of health care has been shedding jobs since April. That is not a good story.

Also, if you want a bit more bad news, the direction of revisions to data tends to be correlated. That means if the prior month’s revision was downward, odds are the current month’s will also be downward and........

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