Jobless claims are not a BLS statistic, which is one key reason why we might not expect perfect consistency with the major payroll reports at times. Times like these, in particular. Instead, the numbers for unemployment insurance applications and payments are tracked by the US Employment and Training Administration (both agencies fall within the Department of Labor). And if the [...]
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 [...]
Back in the middle of 2018, this kind of thing was at least straight forward and intuitive. If there was any confusion, it wasn’t related to the mechanics, rather most people just couldn’t handle the possibility this was real. Jay Powell said inflation, rate hikes, and accelerating growth. Absolutely hawkish across-the-board.And yet, all the way back in the middle of [...]
In the initial days and weeks of the COVID (overreaction) shutdown, layoffs and furloughs were mostly a function of that very thing. A non-economic disruption. As time has gone on, however, continued joblessness can only be a function of economic factors meaning a huge problem (deflation) that isn’t being solved by time. Because of this huge “surprise” in employment data, [...]
What was stupidest about the past few months was how it was these guys who everyone was depending upon to make it all go just perfectly moving forward. Worse, those geniuses being held up as competent economic stewards practically reran the 2008 playbook line by line. What that said, more than anything, was that they had come up with zero [...]
Another 2.1 million Americans have filed this week with their state governments in order to determine their eligibility for unemployment insurance. That brings the 10-week disaster total for these initial jobless claims to an enormous 40.8 million. How did it get to be so many, and why, as states are opening back up, is it continuing in the millions all [...]
Quantum physics has always had a math problem, one that even in its early days the leading physicists were troubled about. Einstein famously remarked, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment now known simply as “Schrödinger’s cat” was meant to mock the Copenhagen interpretation rather than help explain it. But we live in an age [...]
Initial jobless claims fell to just 234k for the week of February 4, nearly matching the 233k multi-decade low in mid-November. That brought the 4-week moving average down to just 244k, which was a new low going all the way back to the early 1970’s. Jobless claims seemingly stand in sharp contrast to other labor market figures which have been [...]
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