According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, layoffs in the US were up 32% in March 2016 over March 2015. Compared to both January and February this year, March was somewhat better but overall for Q1 published layoffs were also 32% more on a year-over-year basis. It wasn’t a very good quarter. Some of that is expected given the death of [...]
As the indications of hitting a cyclical turn multiply against the steady and alarming negative trend baseline background, there is more clarity on how what looks like an unrelenting slowdown had not yet morphed into the traditional recession setting (the “V”). For the most part, it appears as if the business or corporate sector has absorbed the negative pressures not [...]
The fact that there is almost universal recognition of a “manufacturing recession” not just here but spreading across the world is a significant change. After resisting and ignoring as much as possible for more than a year, economic weakness is now no longer unthinkable. This is, however, no mere academic exercise as there are very real consequences as the former [...]
Another contraction in US Industrial Production has extended the slump to half a year. That includes, perhaps more importantly, serious and continued erosion in capacity utilization. There were some minor upward revisions in prior months though nothing to a significant degree, leaving May IP up only 1.37% year-over-year. That is the slowest pace of the entire “recovery” period, and a [...]
The latest updates for the JOLTS showed that job openings in April surged to a new series high. Jumping by 267k (seasonally adjusted), the trend in job openings is being used as confirmation that there must be some robust underlying trend in overall payrolls despite the ubiquitous slump everywhere else. In other words, this is another series from the BLS [...]
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