from Zero Hedge
Today’s payrolls print was the second biggest miss in history (second only to last March) as despite 7 million job openings, only a net 266k additional Americans got jobs.
Who could have possibly seen this coming?
According to Bloomberg, economists are suddenly ‘baffled’ by perhaps the most obvious outcome of a government paying people not to work during the pandemic; there’s a giant shortage of people willing to return to the workforce.
From Chipotle, to MGM, to McDonald’s, companies are now widely reporting that they can’t find – or entice – enough workers to fill open positions now that America has largely emerged from COVID lockdowns. Executives, who are decidedly less ‘baffled’ than the economists, are blaming ‘stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits’ for hampering their efforts to hire.