Welcome to Real Vision.

It's Wednesday, December 4th, 2020, just after market close in New York.

This is the Real Vision Daily Briefing.

I'm Ash Bennington, joined shortly by Real Vision managing editor Ed Harrison. But first with

the day's stories, Jack Farley. Thanks, Ash. Blessed if it does, blessed if it doesn't. That seems to be the destiny of the U.S. equity market.

Let me explain. The non-farm payrolls data came in today.

The U.S. added 245,000 jobs and that sounds good, but it's the

smallest monthly growth we've seen since March by far, the smallest since January

actually and is also well below the median estimate of

four hundred and sixty thousand in fact of the 78 economists surveyed in the

Bloomberg median estimate I just mentioned only six of them had forecasts that were below the actual number of 245,000.

The labor force participation rate dipped from 61.7% to 61.5%.

And that means that 656,000 Americans in aggregate exited the labor market over the last month.

This means that the ominous square root figure of the labor market that many have been talking about

including Ed is continuing to take shape. Lastly it remains the fact that every

single industry and I mean every single industry in the U.S. employs fewer workers than it did one year ago.

The data released today suggests that the damage to the U.S. labor market will endure, and that the economic scarring will last long after

this horrible virus has been overcome.

And what did the equity market do on this bad news?

Well if you thought that it would plummet you were wrong

because US equities were actually up today with all three indices making minor

advances. The bond market concurred with Treasury selling off as investors exited safe assets in order to jump

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