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Two numbers came out this month that are supposed to tell the same story. They don’t.
The first is the May jobs report: 172,000 new payrolls against a Wall Street guess of 80,000. A beat. A blowout, if you read the headlines. The kind of number that lets a financial anchor say the magic words: strong and resilient.
The second number came out a few days earlier, with almost no coverage at all. Bankruptcy filings rose 7% year over year in May. Total filings, businesses and individuals together. And underneath that 7%, the small-business piece was up 36%.
So which is it? A labor market posting a blowout, or an economy where the people who actually employ Americans are filing for bankruptcy in growing numbers? Both can’t be the headline. One of them is the story, and the other is the costume the story is wearing.
