A panel on Fox Business scrambled on Friday to put a negative spin on a blockbuster new jobs report that showed more than 250,000 jobs were created in September.
Even though the new report showed not only strong growth in hiring but also growth in wages significantly outpacing inflation, panelist Joanie Bily nonetheless believed it showed a weak economy if you simply disregard a large number of the jobs that were created.
"When you dig into the data in this report, you can see that those jobs are really created and coming from health care and then leisure and hospitality," she said. "Those are the two big sectors, almost 160,000 of those jobs created in September came from those sectors... the leisure and hospitality are low-paying jobs."
She then told viewers to focus on a net loss of 7,000 manufacturing jobs over the month and the fact that the construction sector "only" gained 25,000 jobs on the month.
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"So if you take out those two sectors, this really isn't a blockbuster report," she explained.
In fact, if you take out the 160,000 of the 250,000 jobs created, it would still lead to a net result of 140,000 jobs created, which would be in line with the consensus expectation of 150,000 created in September.
Nonetheless, this argument was enough to convince host Maria Bartiromo.
"I'm changing my tune on this," she said of the report. "We're looking at low-paying jobs... we're looking at government jobs... these are the jobs where, okay, that's fine, but these aren't the jobs that we want to see growing!"
