Tag Archives: unemployment rate

Forecasting a further upturn in the unemployment rate: what works?  – by New Deal democrat Yesterday I read a post over at Seeking Alpha in which the author confidently predicted a recession in Q1 next year, based exclusively on the NAHB builder sentiment index. Here’s his accompanying graph, comparing builder sentiment with the unemployment rate 17 months later: In case you didn’t already figure it out, the graph forecasts a 7%...

Continuing improvement in new jobless claims re-sets the clock  – by New Deal democrat Let’s get the easy part of this morning’s slew of data out of the way first:  initial jobless claims declined -7,000 to 221,000. The 4 week average declined -3,750 to 233,750. With a one week lag, continuing claims declined -50,000 to 1.690 million: All of these are generally 5 month lows. The more important YoY% change for forecasting purposes also...

The unemployment rate is not *uniquely* overestimating the “true” employment situation Bill McBride a/k/a Calculated Risk put up an entry over the weekend positing that the employment situation is worse than the unemployment rate indicates. He bases this on the expectation that the overall labor force was expected to grow by 100,000 a month in 2020 and this year, whereas as of last month there were a little more than 2.9 million less people...

Rather than attempt to explain what the mainly neoclassical economists are going on about, I want to step back and try to translate their debate into terms that would be understood by people who do not share the same assumptions. I am pretty sure that post-Keynesian economists have a lot to say about the topic as well, but once again, they tend to be discussing wonkish points that would elude an outsider.…I have an engineering background, and engineering is largely the science of...

A few lonely voices disputed this consensus. In their view, these two distinct mysteries weren’t actually distinct — or all that mysterious. The reason wage growth wasn’t rising as one would expect with the economy near full employment was that the economy wasn’t near full employment. And the reason the economy wasn’t near full employment was that all those prime-age workers who’d supposedly exited the labor force for reasons totally unrelated to the strength of the economy hadn’t actually...

Numbers are out,employment rose by 151,000 in last month, and December numbers were revised down too.Manufacturing added 29,000 jobs in January. The unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent. Also, average hourly earnings increased by 12 cents last month, and at about 2.5 percent for the last year. So the unemployment rate has crossed the 5 percent barrier, but inflation does not seem to pick up. The natural rate keeps moving, and mainstream macro has very little to say about it.