Jobs, Unemployment and Wages; The Government, and who was Ed Mintz?

Mar 11

Jobs Up, Unemployment Up.

275,000 new jobs were added in February. What were the expectations? 198,000.

Unemployment went up to 3.9%, and the increase in hourly wages slowed ever so slightly.
As it turns out, good Good News all around.

Jobs were up – good for everyone, but it shows the Fed things have not slowed down.
Unemployment is up, but only to 3.9%. This shows the Fed that the economy is cooling.
Hourly wages increased at a decreasing rate, a 0.1% monthly increase, also showing a cooling economy (perhaps) but still going up.

In summary, the economy is still doing pretty well, but there are some signs that may—repeat ‘may’—show the Fed that the economy is cooling off.
This would lead to the Fed dropping its rates, probably in June, which Wall Street likes.
When rates go down, stocks generally go up for two main reasons:

Cost of credit drops which helps the bottom line of borrowers
Stocks become more competitive with financial products (CDs, government bonds) and more people may buy stocks. That drives the market up.

Government Shutdown? Not!

At least until the end of the fiscal year, only for a few select departments. Six more departments need to get funded in the next two weeks, including the defense department.

Let’s say your annual income is $100,000.
If you functioned like the federal government, your annual spend would be $137,780.
Where would you get the money? Well, if you lived in California, probably your home equity, but at some point, you’d hit a limit.

And California would probably figure out a way to tax a cash-out refinance of your home equity.

Ed Mintz, Entrepreneur

He was born in Milwaukee in 1940 and raised by his grandmother.
As a teen, he wrote a book about square roots called “The Mintz Method of Extraction of Roots”.

Who does that in high school? Not me, but it must have worked because he met his wife in high school and they eventually eloped.

Later in life, he would teach math tricks to his three kids and grandkids. Sounds like a dad thing.
After getting a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, he moved to L.A. and started a company that provided billing software to the dental industry. Among other ventures.
One night in 1978, he went to see Neil Simon’s “The Cheap Detective” on opening night in Westwood, California. He had read a glowing review of the film but, upon exiting, exclaimed to his wife, “What a piece of garbage!”.

He was a math whiz, computer programmer, and serial entrepreneur. Instead of relying on a movie critic, what if he could give viewers a letter grade to what a few hundred people who saw the movie thought?

And CinemaScore was born. This was before Siskel & Ebert (look it up) and before the internet, social media, and Rotten Tomatoes.

Initially, Pollsters stood outside theaters in Westwood handing out cards to people on the way in to see a movie on its opening night. As patrons exited the theatre, they collected the cards, went by a local fast-food restaurant, and spread out the cards to tabulate the results.

Since he collected demographic information, the data he gathered was valuable to the movie studios and something they used to market the movie.

Proof for Mintz that he had built CinemaScore into a mega-brand came in 2018 when he met Dwayne Johnson, who called him “an icon,” according to family members. That made Mintz’s day.

The CPI, PPI, Food Prices, Rates, IRS, Counting Character and who was Sidney Liebowitz?