July jobs report: Establishment survey weak (but still positive), Household survey (even more) recessionary – by New Deal democrat In the past few months, my focus has been on whether jobs gains are most consistent with a “soft landing,” i.e., no further deterioration, or whether deceleration is ongoing. In the last several months I have also pointed out that the Household Survey is probably understating growth because of its large undercount...
Read More »Scenes from the July jobs report
Scenes from the July jobs report [Note: I haven’t put up a Coronavirus dashboard in almost a week. I’ll try to get around to that later today or tomorrow. It isn’t *all* bad news.] Last Friday’s jobs report for July was probably the most uniformly positive report I have seen since I started writing about them going on 15 years ago. Let’s take a look at a few of the most salient items.First of all, unemployment (blue in the graph below) at...
Read More »July jobs report: more like this, please
July jobs report: more like this, please While the NBER has declared that the recession ended in April 2020, and income, sales, and GDP have all fully recovered, two of the series that the NBER uses have yet to have made a full recovery: Industrial production, still down -1.2% compared with February 2020, and employment, still down -4.4% as of the jobs report last month. So the main questions for this month’s jobs report for July are how much...
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