The August jobs report smacked of late cycle deceleration

The August jobs report smacked of late cycle deceleration

As promised, here is my abbreviated and late take on this morning’s employment report.

While the additions to temporary positions (a leading indicator for jobs overall), and construction, and manufacturing jobs were welcome, this report sure looked like late cycle deceleration.

The YoY% growth in jobs – a very un-noisy metric – declined again slightly:

The number of people not in the labor force who want a job shot back up:

Those who are involuntarily part-time went sideways:

On the (relatively) bright side, when we adjust both of these metrics by the working age population, the comparisons with the last two expansions aren’t quite so weak:

Finally, what on earth is it going to take to get wage growth for nonsupervisory workers?

And, although I won’t bother showing the graph, we didn’t make any progress on either the unemployment or underemployment rate.

So while the good news is, I still don’t see any actual downturn anywhere near in time, this employment report was another sign of late cycle deceleration.