The BLS reported that the rate of hiring in the US continues to be sluggish and sideways. Total hiring across the labor market was estimated to be 5.08 million (SA) in September, down from August and the second slowest rate this year. Since first surpassing 5 million back in September 2014, the overall pace of employer engagement has been largely [...]
In all honesty, I could start almost any piece I write with the phrase “economists are stumped.” It has become something of a baseline where there is some element or condition of the global economy that doesn’t make sense to them. The latest update in JOLTS for July continues to be faithful to the seeming contradiction. By view of the [...]
The latest JOLTS update finds total hires in January down by a rather large 372k, leaving the monthly seasonally-adjusted rate at still 5 million. Given that the estimated hires rate increased unusually in December, it seems as if January was the statistical catchup or seasonal give-back. That leaves intact the same sideways pattern that first appeared around October 2014. Throughout [...]
The BLS published its updated JOLTS figures for August last week, and while most commentary continues to focus on the ephemeral Job Openings category it shouldn’t. Though Job Openings declined sharply by just about 300,000 in the current estimate (from a slight downward revision of July) it still rates as completely out of alignment with the rest of the JOLTS [...]
Typically when any statistic gets way out ahead of itself it will eventually revert toward its prior state. That is the nature of stochastic modeling in economic accounts and it presents a great weakness. It is not unshared, however, as that is nothing more than recency bias applied to a quite dynamic world. The great flaw in any stochastic model [...]
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