The numbers all change with each month, but nothing really changes. And that includes how the economy changed in 2012 and clearly again in 2015. By raw count of the payroll figures, there were positive numbers in every location in the latest update as only full-time employment was close to zero growth (only +3k for November). The labor force grew [...]
There is no accounting for revisions because by the time anyone remembers it was too late. The same is true for monthly variations that can easily become swallowed by overarching trends unconcerned with such small time periods. All of that means we shall repeat, over and over, the same incessant dichotomy whereby everything looks bad and even recessionary but the [...]
If central banks are now almost exclusively on the defensive, we have no shortage of anecdotes and data to explain it. For a good long while economists and commentary managed to keep the US safely “decoupled” from the “overseas” maelstrom, but the deluge locally has become far too much to ignore. This is far, far deeper than just some indistinct [...]
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 [...]
Even before the payroll report was issued, there was already an effort underway to downplay any negative potential. Global markets have been upset and in turmoil, but the US consumer and the consumer economy are supposedly undeterred by all that. So any weakness in September, as August, is being suggested as “residual seasonality.” This view was amplified by a Bloomberg [...]
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 [...]
There are only two numbers in the monthly payroll report that have any meaning, and both came up quite short yet again. The first, as always, is the labor force itself as that population estimate more than any other indicates the relative station of the US economy. There has never been any time in recorded economic history where economic growth [...]
The monthly payroll report needs to be rebranded the monthly labor force report. By far, the most accurate measure of the series continues to be the apathy of Americans not currently working or looking toward purportedly massive employment expansion. Those two positions are not only inconsistent, they are by all intuitive sense mutually exclusive. No less orthodoxy than Janet Yellen [...]
There should be no more “ifs”, no more caveats and qualifications. After trillions of printed illusions through four QE’s and now almost seven years of ZIRP, she still can’t say for certain whether the economy is actually performing. However, the fact that Janet Yellen won’t say so is all the evidence you need, as for surely by now, especially given [...]
It makes a very interesting contrast, to start the week under cloud of suspicion only to end it with its reverse. Economic data was routinely awful earlier, though for the most part financial markets are moved more by how that might make Janet Yellen feel than anything of a fundamental basis for all those prices. Typically, the ISM surveys are [...]
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