It’s about time. I’ve been writing for years that the payroll reports are, mostly, irrelevant. That’s never how they are received, though, some months wherein the new low for the unemployment rate or the blowout headline payroll figure send risk markets soaring. Not this month. Can you imagine what the last couple of reports would have done a year ago? [...]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has begun the process of updating its annual benchmarks. Actually, the process began last year and what’s happening now is that the government is releasing its findings to the public. Up first is the Household Survey, the less-watched, more volatile measure which comes at employment from the other direction. As the name implies, the [...]
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 [...]
You never fixate on a single employment report. It is a lesson that Jay Powell may not have yet learned. Either that, or he was desperately grasping for straws. The Federal Reserve is trying to thread a very fine needle; on the one hand, the rate cuts. On the other, he doesn’t want them to become a catalyst for people [...]
It’s never about a single payroll report. Even still, there’s something significant in how the “good” ones aren’t measuring up the way they used to. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the US economy gained 224k payrolls in the month of June 2019. Well above consensus, the headline is being described as relieving some of the growing economic [...]
It’s never just one payroll report. The month-to-month changes in the Establishment Survey barely qualify as statistically significant, let alone meaningful. What that means is one good monthly headline is nothing to get excited about, just as one bad month shouldn’t get anyone too worked up. May 2019’s jobs report, however, isn’t in isolation. The headline for the Establishment Survey [...]
If the unemployment rate reaches zero and wages still don’t explode higher, the economy falls off, will Economists, central bankers, and the media stop relying on this one statistic for overall economic interpretation? You can be reasonably excited when the unemployment rate falls below 5%, as it did four years ago. Three point six, however, that’s something else entirely. We’ve [...]
Milton Friedman was right about a lot of things. He was wrong about quite a bit, too. The stuff where he erred is what central banks now do in his name. The activist central bank is an outgrowth of monetarism, the academic approach to rethinking the Great Depression after Friedman and Anna Schwartz published A Monetary History. Toward the end [...]
The BLS giveth, and the BLS taketh away. That’s not really what has happened, of course, but for many it can seem that way. February’s payroll report obviously stands in striking contrast to January’s. The latter was a blowout, over +311k (revised), hyped near and far as proof of decoupling, the US economy the only clean shirt. In comes the [...]
On Friday, February, 2, 2001, the BLS reported stellar headline numbers for its Employment Situation release. Preliminary estimates for the Establishment Survey suggested US payrolls had gained +268k in the month of January. To put it in perspective, that would equate to +324k in today’s population, or a bit better than the latest figure. The economic climate of the time [...]
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