With all due respect to durable goods, perhaps I was a bit too hasty in assigning it the moniker of most boring. There is certainly competition now, as the monthly payroll euphoria has become just as homogenous, curiously, and engrained enough where commentary can simply be copied and pasted from month-to-month. Most people probably will not recall that such regularity [...]
It’s payroll day again, which means we get to watch the straight-line march of the Establishment Survey “confirm” whatever the observer wishes to infer because a straight line is both uninteresting and mostly not useful. This happens, of course, regardless of what other parts of the survey or other surveys show. The most prominent disagreement continues to be with the [...]
There was more bad news for real estate recently beyond the consistent declines in housing stats. The one factor that housing bulls have been awaiting is household formation, though so far that one has remained a drag. And that was supposed to be the catalyst, in that eventually Americans had to begin moving out once more. After so many years [...]
The major headlines will continue to focus on the month-to-month changes in the Establishment Survey though the real analysis is the labor force. Given that the April to June period is often the most heavily influenced by birth-death imputation I would caution over-interpretation of that headline. That is further directed by a conflicting -73k in the Household Survey. This disparity, [...]
Before getting into the details of the monthly payroll frenzy, the idea of a “strong” jobs report needs to be addressed. The headline for ABC News was, Stocks Are Mixed Despite Strong US Jobs Report, while Forex News topline said, US Dollar Firms after Strong Jobs Report. As if each media outlet were simply copying from each other, everywhere you [...]
The term discontinuity is probably unfamiliar to the casual observer of economic accounts, but they are quite regular features in almost all the statistical data series. It goes with the territory, as statistical estimates themselves vary in depth and “quality.” For example, when the Census Bureau updates its population estimates to incorporate fuller or “better” samples or sample sizes, it [...]
It’s that day of the month when the apex of silly attention gets focused on the BLS. Just in time to directly contradict the FOMC’s “careful” rationale for cutting back on the fuel for small caps and the flood of cov-lite, the December jobs report was wintry. Despite the paltry advance in the Establishment Survey, there has been a rush [...]
I should clarify from Friday and highlight that the Y/Y decline in the official Labor Force (OLF) is a new occurrence. It is a separate, but related, correlation to the increase in the number of those Not in the Labor Force (NLF). Up until October 2012 (there’s that month again), the size of the OLF and the cohort of undercounted [...]
The primary appeal of the Establishment Survey over the Household Survey is its lack of volatility. It is believed that gives the observer a greater degree of precision in estimating monthly changes in employment. In the case of the government shutdown in October, it appears as if that view has been confirmed. The Household Survey showed a very large decline [...]
The biggest avowed critique of the current method of estimating changes in economic accounts is the inability of statistical techniques to anticipate trend changes, or inflections. This gets back to the basics of statistical analysis as it relates to “seasonal” adjustments that are really driven by “trend-cycle” analysis. Until the NBER declares a recession, or more specifically a “cyclical peak”, [...]
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