Tag Archive: unemployment rate

May Payrolls (and more) Confirm Slowdown (and more)

2022-06-07

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2022-06-07

May 2022’s payroll estimates weren’t quite the level of downshift President Phillips had warned about, though that’s increasingly likely just a matter of time. In fact, despite the headline Establishment Survey monthly change being slightly better than expected, it and even more so the other employment data all still show an unmistakable slowdown in the labor market.

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Weekly Market Pulse: What Now?

2022-04-05

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2022-04-05

The yield curve inverted last week. Well, the part everyone watches, the 10 year/2 year Treasury yield spread, inverted, closing the week a solid 7 basis points in the negative. The difference between the 10 year and 2 year Treasury yields is not the yield curve though. The 10/2 spread is one point on the Treasury yield curve which is positively sloped from 1 month to 3 years, negatively sloped from 3 years to 10 years and positively sloped again...

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For The Fed, None Of These Details Will Matter

2022-03-06

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2022-03-06

Most people have the impression that these various payroll and employment reports just go into the raw data and count up the number of payrolls and how many Americans are employed. Perhaps the BLS taps the IRS database as fellow feds, or ADP as a private company in the same data business of employment just tallies how many payrolls it processes as the largest provider of back-office labor services.That’s just not how it works, though. In fact,...

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Taper Discretion Means Not Loving Payrolls Anymore

2022-01-10

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2022-01-10

When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money.The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it was again his topic in California early Autumn ’97.

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As The Fed Tapers: What If More Rapid (published) Wage Increases Are Actually Evidence of *Deflationary* Conditions?

2022-01-05

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2022-01-05

Since the Federal Reserve is not in the money business, their recent hawkish shift toward an increasingly anti-inflationary stance is a twisted and convoluted case of subjective interpretation.

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For The Love Of Unemployment Rates

2021-10-12

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2021-10-12

Here we are again. The labor force. The numbers from the BLS are simply staggering. During September 2021, the government believes it shrank for another month, down by 183,000 when compared to August. This means that the Labor Force Participation rate declined slightly to 61.6%, practically the same level in this key metric going back to June.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Time For A Taper Tantrum?

2021-09-20

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2021-09-20

The Fed meets this week and is widely expected to say that it is talking about maybe reducing bond purchases sometime later this year or maybe next year or at least, someday. Jerome Powell will hold a press conference at which he’ll tell us that markets have nothing to worry about because even if they taper QE, interest rates aren’t going up for a long, long time.

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Inflation Hysteria #2 (Slack-edotes)

2020-12-13

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2020-12-13

Macroeconomic slack is such an easy, intuitive concept that only Economists and central bankers (same thing) could possibly mess it up. But mess it up they have. Spending years talking about a labor shortage, and getting the financial media to report this as fact, those at the Federal Reserve, in particular, pointed to this as proof QE and ZIRP had fulfilled the monetary policy mandates – both of them.

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Polar Opposite Sides of Consumer Credit End Up in the Same Place: Jobs

2020-12-08

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2020-12-08

CPS Household Survey, 2003-2020
If anything is going to be charged off, it might be student loans. All the rage nowadays, the government, approximately half of it, is busily working out how it “should” be done and by just how much. A matter of economic stimulus, loan cancellation proponents are correct that students have burdened themselves with unprofitable college “education” investments.

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Good Payrolls Still Say Slowdown

2020-11-09

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2020-11-09

Pro forma CES Private Payrolls, 2020-2021
The payroll report for the month of October 2020 was a very good one. This shouldn’t be surprising, perfect BLS publications appear with regularity even during the most challenging of circumstances. Headlines and underneath, everything looked fine last month.

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Who’s Negative? The Marginal American Worker

2020-10-06

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2020-10-06

CPS Household Survey: Civilian Labor Force Level, 2007-2020
The BLS’s payroll report draws most of the mainstream attention, with the exception of the unemployment rate (especially these days). The government designates the former as the Current Employment Statistics (CES) series, and it intends to measure factors like payrolls (obviously), wages, and earnings from the perspective of the employers, or establishments.

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This Has To Be A Joke, Because If It’s Not…

2020-08-28

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2020-08-28

US Treasury and Auction Rates, Oct 2018 Aug 2020
After thinking about it all day, I’m still not quite sure this isn’t a joke; a high-brow commitment of utterly brilliant performance art, the kind of Four-D masterpiece of hilarious deception that Andy Kaufman would’ve gone nuts over. I mean, it has to be, right?I’m talking, of course, about Jackson Hole and Jay Powell’s reportedly genius masterstroke.

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A Second JOLTS

2020-08-11

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2020-08-11

What happens when we are stunned and dazed? We filter out the noise to focus on the bare basics by getting back to our instincts, acting reflexively based upon our deeply held beliefs and especially training. When faced with a crisis and there’s no time to really think, shorthand will have to suffice.

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Reality Beckons: Even Bigger Payroll Gains, Much Less Fuss Over Them

2020-07-05

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2020-07-05

What a difference a month makes. The euphoria clearly fading even as the positive numbers grow bigger still. The era of gigantic pluses is only reaching its prime, which might seem a touch pessimistic given the context. In terms of employment and the labor market, reaction to the Current Employment Situation (CES) report seems to indicate widespread recognition of this situation. And that means how there are actually two labor markets at the moment.

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What Did Everyone Think Was Going To Happen?

2020-06-06

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2020-06-06

Unemployment Insurance, Continued Claims, 2017-2020
Honestly, what did everyone think was going to happen? I know, I’ve seen the analyst estimates. They were talking like another six or seven perhaps eight million job losses on top of the twenty-plus already gone. Instead, the payroll report (Establishment Survey) blew everything away, coming in both at two and a half million but also sporting a plus sign.The Household Survey was even better, +3.8mm during May 2020. But, again, why wasn’t this...

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It’s Hard To See Anything But Enormous Long-term Cost

2020-04-07

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2020-04-07

The unemployment rate wins again. In a saner era, back when what was called economic growth was actually economic growth, this primary labor ratio did a commendable job accurately indicating the relative conditions in the labor market. You didn’t go looking for corroboration because it was all around; harmony in numbers for a far more peaceful and serene period.

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Like Repo, The Labor Lie

2020-03-08

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2020-03-08

Federal Reserve Beige Book, 2010-2020
The Federal Reserve has been trying to propagate two big lies about the economy. Actually, it’s three but the third is really a combination of the first two. To start with, monetary authorities have been claiming that growing liquidity problems were the result of either “too many” Treasuries (haven’t heard that one in a while) or the combination of otherwise benign technical factors.

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Inflation, But Only At The Morgue

2020-01-18

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2020-01-18

Mortality Rates Divided by age group, 1999-2017
Why is everyone so angry? How can socialism possibly be on such a rise, particularly among younger people around the world? Why are Americans suddenly dying off? According to one study, two-thirds of millennials are convinced they are doing worse when compared to their parents’ generation. Sixty-two percent say they are living paycheck to paycheck, with no savings and no way to get any (though they also tend to “overspend” when compared to other...

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Disposable (Employment) Figures

2019-12-11

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2019-12-11

Establishment Survey; Blowout Payrolls, 2014-2019
If last month’s payroll report was declared to be strong at +128k, then what would that make this month’s +266k? Epic? Heroic? The superlatives are flying around today, as you should expect. This Payroll Friday actually fits the times. It wasn’t great, they never really are nowadays (when you adjust for population and participation), but it was a good one nonetheless.

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From Friends to Nemeses: JO and Jay

2019-11-08

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2019-11-08

JOLTS - Job Openings, SA 2017-2019
It was one of the first major speeches of his tenure. Speaking to the Economic Club of Chicago in April 2018, newly crowned Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was full of optimism. At that time, however, optimism was being framed as some sort of bad thing. This was the height of inflation hysteria, where any sort of official upgrade to the economic condition was taken as further “hawkishness.”

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