The payroll report disappointed again, especially since October has in the past marked the end of seasonal weakness. Last year the headline for the Establishment Survey followed the usual summer doldrums: July +277k, Aug +150k, Sept +149k, and October 2015 +295k. This year, the sequence has been (with revisions): July +252k, Aug +176k, Sept +191k, and October 2016 +161k. To [...]
ADP Research Institute’s National Employment Report has the reputation of being a solid proxy for the BLS’s monthly payroll figures. In my view, that makes it superfluous unless there is some missing trading value for being two days earlier. But if we think of the government’s statistics as of limited use themselves, then there is perhaps the same limited use [...]
The JOLTS series is, in my view, a second tier data set made so by its computational connections to the CES. The Job Openings portion I believe has proven over the past few years why it is less reliable, surging so far out of character that it is all alone in suggesting huge economic positivity that even the main BLS [...]
The Federal Reserve’s Labor Market Conditions Index (LMCI) fell back -2.2 in September. Revisions to the last few months were also downward, suggesting once again that there is no positive economic momentum this year. Apart from a positive change in July, the LMCI declined in every other month of 2016. With increasing negatives after July, it appears that any hopes [...]
The September payroll report continues a string of repetitious unevenness that is the hallmark of these types of economic periods. The economy seems to appear strong then weak and then strong again so that just when “everyone” is ready to put the weakness behind, it disappoints all over again. It is a seemingly confusing condition made more so by especially [...]
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 Federal Reserve’s Labor Market Conditions Index (LMCI) fell to contraction again in August. After rebounding in July for the first positive reading of 2016, the LMCI dropped to -0.7 in the latest update. As usual, revisions have reshaped the levels of indicated problems throughout the past two years, but overall the trend remains. From this view of the labor [...]
The primary symptom of the economic malaise or depression that has developed since the Great Recession (which wasn’t a recession) is an economy that works less and thus earns less. Such a condition would suggest a shrunken system or at least vastly diminished potential. That much is well-established even in the orthodox literature though it isn’t ever talked about publicly. [...]
In the technical notes for the Employment Situation Report, the payroll numbers that everyone obsesses over in fine detail, the BLS still shows a 90% confidence interval at 1.6 standard deviations that works out to +/- 115k. That means that whatever number gets splashed onto every headline and worked into every major commentary piece isn’t really the number of payroll [...]
The Federal Reserve carefully notes that its Labor Market Conditions Index (LMCI) is subject to revisions in as much as its entire history almost every month. That is the nature of the project trying to tie together 19 separate data points into a coherent yet comprehensive whole. Part of the inherent recurrence of revisions, however, is simply the pace of [...]
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