Scenes from the July employment report – by New Deal democrat On Friday I noted that the July employment report was a perfectly good, solid one in absolute terms, but that almost all the leading components were soft and weakening, as I would expect to see near the final stages of an expansion. Let’s take a […]
Another well defined report by NDd about the possibility of recessions. Everything points in such a direction. If the Fed keeps raising its rate, it is almost a foregone conclusion. One a recession starts there is no backing away from it (as if we could). Scenes from the employment report: important leading and coincident indicators […]
Scenes from the June employment report: consumption leads employment, goods vs. services edition – by New Deal democrat No big new economic news today, so let’s take a more in-depth look at some of the information from Friday’s employment report. Today I’m going to focus on the division between goods and services. As I’ve written […]
Scenes from the November employment report: the short leading jobs indicators – by New Deal Democrat Every month as part of my post on the jobs report, I run through the changes in those measures which are short leading indicators for the economy. There were some significant developments in the past several months, so let’s […]
Initial claims: a little cooling in the white hot employment market Initial jobless claims rose 21,000 to 218,000, continuing above the recent 50+ year low of 166,000 set in March. The 4 week average also rose by 8,250 to 199,500, compared with the all-time low of 170,500 set six weeks ago. On the other hand, […]
JOLTS report for January: the game of employment musical chairs continues The Census Bureau JOLTS report for January, released this morning, indicates that the jobs market continues to be nowhere near equilibrium – which continues to be a good thing for workers’ wages. Several months ago I introduced the idea of a game similar […]
Pandemic job losses: when should we begin a see a real improvement back towards “full employment”? Let’s take a deeper look at where employment stands as we begin to see the end of the pandemic in sight. As I and many others noted last Friday, although with the exception of one month there have been […]
The employment report shows signs of an improved employment situation, but on balance it looks like more of the same. The unemployment rate fell 0.2 points to 8.5%. This continues the recent trend of a falling unemployment rate. But the drop was also driven by anther 50,000 drop in thelabor force. But the increase in […]
The employment report continues to report a sluggish economy and employment growth. The payroll report showed a gain of 120,000 jobs in November, consisting of a 140,000 gain in private payrolls and a 20,000 drop in government employment. The household survey months showed the stronger gains it has in recent with a gain of some […]
If you are an investor the good news is that productivity growth improved sharply. Unit labor cost fell in the third quarter and the spread between pricing and labor cost widened nicely. This implies that earnings growth is accelerating and that my earlier fears that earnings expectations were too high is no longer a problem. […]