Global factors, meaning that the wave of significantly higher deflationary potential (therefore, diminishing inflationary chances which were never good to begin with) in global bond yields the past five months have seemingly focused on troubles brewing outside the US. Overseas turmoil, it was called back in 2015, leaving by default a picture of relative American strength and harmony.The rest of [...]
Payrolls for the month of June were a mixed bag, in that the payroll data was better than expected at the same time nothing else was. After a couple months of ho-hum gains for the Establishment Survey, government hiring (mostly) boosted the latest monthly figure to +853,000. This brings the 6-month average up to +543,000, which is either really good [...]
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. George Orwell, 1984 I have said many times and believe deeply that our job as investors is not to predict the future but merely to interpret the present as accurately as we can. I've also said and believe deeply that doing [...]
February’s cold winter blast throughout the Southern United States was supposed to have been the extent of the weakness. The unusual and unusually severe freeze caused a great deal of havoc, making its way very quickly into economic data. The recovery was said to have been on a winning streak (vaccines, gov’t payments, etc.) so it seemed the easiest correlation [...]
Because it was outdated by publication of the most recent payroll data for April 2021, the follow-up updated JOLTS estimates for March don’t end up having quite the same impact. In one sense, that’s unfortunate because they are once again providing another useful demonstration of the limitations over decoding the employment situation.Job Openings (JO), for one. Before getting to them, [...]
Huge miss. Whopping dud. Maybe it wasn’t nearly that bad?The consensus forecast had called for payroll growth in April 2021 of something like +980,000, in line with the previous blowout estimate for March. In the updated batch, first that prior one was revised downward to just +770,000 and then the latest guess put the current month at a seemingly awful [...]
Reopening 2 is definitely happening. The labor market, in particular, is sending off the same kind of signals if not to the same huge extent as it had during Reopening 1 in May and June of last year. The March 2021 payroll report was better than 900,000, and the one for April (last month) to be released tomorrow is expected [...]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that in the month of March 2021 somewhere around 916,000 payrolls were added back to the economy. I have to disclaim the figure simply because the statistics used to create it aren’t really all that precise; piecing together data from a survey of 145,000 business establishments, a fraction of the economy’s total, the [...]
Last Friday’s March 2021 payroll report exceeded expectations in nearly every category. Analysts were hoping for something like the ADP’s private employment gains (+517k), somewhere in the ballpark of 550,000 to 600,000. Instead, the BLS thinks the whole economy had added between 803,700 and 1,028,300 (90% confidence). This translated into the “headline” of +916,000, of which +780,000 in the private [...]
At first glance, the numbers weren’t bad. Maybe even borderline OK. The headline payroll figure nearly doubled consensus estimates, even better when taking into account only private payrolls even after ADP earlier this week had reported the opposite. Topline, the Establishment Survey gained 379,000 in February 2021, of which 465,000 were reportedly added to the private economy (government employment shrank [...]
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