If the payroll numbers are old news because they aren’t supposed to matter anymore, what with TGA drawdowns and vaccines, then JOLTS figures one month further behind them must count for even less. Gradation does factor here, though, and that’s why it’s important to keep the current and slightly-in-arrears data in mind.What I mean is that the stimulus-frenzy narrative does [...]
The good news, such that it might be, is that the BLS - using data from the Census Bureau - believes that the American population is slowing down. According to the latest Civilian Non-institutional population estimates for January 2021, published alongside the current payroll report, the count was adjusted downward by around 400,000 consistent with the same kind and level [...]
The post-Pfizer vaccine rush pushed most of the contango out of the WTI futures curve. The aftermath of the Georgia Senate vote, and with it dreams of even larger, more carefree fiscal “stimulus”, drained all the rest. As of this week, the entire crude curve is once more contango-free; backwardation front to back.The physical markets have been able to fundamentally [...]
ADP let the cat of the bag on Wednesday when the payroll processing provider announced it believed the level of private employment had declined in December 2020. Since it wasn’t likely to have been wildly inaccurate, it set the stage for a renewed negative number in the main government payroll report released today.According to those BLS’s Current Employment Statistics (CES), [...]
Is it a race against time? Or is it trying to set aside today so as to focus entirely on a specific kind of tomorrow? It’s easy to do the latter especially when today is what it is; you can’t change what’s already gone on. You can, however, think that today won’t impede or even impact a much better tomorrow [...]
Bad news is good news? The payroll report for November 2020, like those of the previous four months, have only further corroborated and confirmed the untimely death of the recovery. Since actual recovery can take only a “V” shape, then the end of the “V” necessarily means the end of recovery.In the twisted world of mainstream assumptions, however, fret none. [...]
The oil market has caught a mild case of the raging disease. Not COVID, rather the purported cure for it. Vaccine-phoria has visited the energy sector and propelled oil prices upward while pulling less contango in the futures curve, awakening this commodity market from its post-August doldrums. It had been that detour in WTI which began to suggest this summer [...]
The primary reason for that first rate hike in a decade in December 2015 was ferbus figuring that full employment had probably been reached, certainly close to where the unemployment rate had fallen at that time. The Fed’s main econometric model calculated this key economic level at between 4.8% and 5.0% unemployment; the actual rate for that month hit five [...]
The payroll report for the month of October 2020 was a very good one. This shouldn’t be surprising, perfect BLS publications appear with regularity even during the most challenging of circumstances. Headlines and underneath, everything looked fine last month. It wasn’t perfect, however, and it’s the same things that leave it short of perfection which are entirely too familiar for [...]
While we wait for the electoral count to be sorted out by what we hope are competent and honest people (not holding our breath), there’s a greater muddle growing where it actually counts and where it’s never fully nor properly accounted. By a large and growing number of accounts, the US economy’s rebound seems to have stalled out back around [...]
Stay In Touch