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 look with some graphs today. First, the good news. The employment population ratio for the prime age working group, ages 25-54,...
Read More »Scenes from the July employment report
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 look with some graphs today. First, the good news. The employment population ratio for the prime age working group, ages 25-54,...
Read More »Scenes from the employment report: important leading and coincident indicators of recession
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 of recession – by New Deal democrat Here’s another detailed look at some significant data from last Friday’s...
Read More »Scenes from the June employment report: consumption leads employment, goods vs. services edition
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 many times in the past, consumption leads employment. Typically I have shown that via real retail sales. The...
Read More »November employment report
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 take a closer look here. Here’s a historical look at temporary help services, residential construction jobs, and...
Read More »Initial claims: a little cooling in the white hot employment market
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, continuing claims declined another -25,000 to 1,317,000, yet another new 50 year low (but still well above their 1968 all-time low of...
Read More »The game of employment musical chairs continues
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 to musical chairs, where employers added or took away chairs, and employees tried to best allocate themselves...
Read More »When should we begin a see a real improvement back towards “full employment”?
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 job gains every month starting last May, at the pace of the last few months it would take 2 years or more just to get back to the level of...
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