I’ve always disliked the ritual of Payroll Friday because that’s what it is. The BLS doesn’t even measure the change in payrolls, for crying out loud. The government attempts to define a very wide interval into which the real labor market may have fallen. Even then it’s nothing like precision, especially at a low 90% confidence interval.And don’t get me [...]
Time may not heal all wounds, after all. One thing it does do is clarify. There was a time not all that long ago when 20 million sounded absolutely enormous. How quaint today. At the end of March, initial jobless claims in the US were surpassing that unthinkable level leaving everyone to hope it wouldn’t get much worse. Having blown [...]
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 [...]
Is it really that simple? The central bank hands out “free” money or “supports” markets with purchases, so that’s all there is to it. Once Jay Powell or Christine Lagarde moves in with the big bazookas, who’s not going to climb on board the money train as it rockets out of the inflation station?If only Weimar was that easy. Easy [...]
Is it already priced in? Depends, of course, on who you ask and more importantly which market is carrying out the presumed discounting. Stocks surged on the idea that though this is epic in its misery we’re already getting past the worst. Short run disruption, a big one, but nothing more. It’s almost preprogrammed at this point: the data for [...]
The debate over the shape of the recovery, "V" or "L", which might emerge following the dislocation and global contraction. What clues can we find? 1. Domestic Data clues (The Two Easiest Dots Anyone Will Ever Have To Connect) "Deprive any animal of oxygen and watch how it doesn’t move very fast." How the labor force changed [...]
Toward the end of March 2012, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was busy with so many things. It wasn’t supposed to have been that way, not after two “massive” QE’s launched in the wake of the Great “Recession.” After all, V-shaped recoveries provide their own momentum upon which central bankers might piggy-back. In short, there shouldn’t have been any questions [...]
The unemployment rate wins again. In a saner era, back when what was called economic growth was actually economic growth, this primary labor ratio did a commendable job accurately indicating the relative conditions in the labor market. You didn’t go looking for corroboration because it was all around; harmony in numbers for a far more peaceful and serene period.Ever since [...]
The JOLTS series had always been a seemingly superfluous set of labor numbers for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The agency wanted to go deeper into employment when it originally presented these other series in 2002. The unemployment rate seemed accurate enough, but it came at the labor market solely from the view of labor supply. As the BLS [...]
It certainly doesn’t feel like a bubble. We’ve heard about home prices in many cities skyrocketing like there has been one, still there does seem to be something different. If it is a bubble, it sure isn’t the same as the last one, the big one fifteen years ago. Much is missing this time around. For one thing, prices are [...]
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