The advance estimate for Q4 GDP was not appreciably different than the preliminary figures, changing +0.6% into +1.00033%. It wasn’t anywhere close to enough of a revision to meaningfully alter the picture of the 2015 economy. The average growth in 2015 was just 2.40% (until the next revision next month) compared to 2.43% in 2014; while the average of SAAR [...]
The updated JOLTS numbers for September just confirmed more nonsense on the part of the BLS. Job openings continue to be all their own while the rest of the data series, even as the whole is indexed to the CES, at best stagnates. On every other count, including hires and quits, there is something drastically different in the US labor [...]
There is no accounting for revisions because by the time anyone remembers it was too late. The same is true for monthly variations that can easily become swallowed by overarching trends unconcerned with such small time periods. All of that means we shall repeat, over and over, the same incessant dichotomy whereby everything looks bad and even recessionary but the [...]
The BLS published its updated JOLTS figures for August last week, and while most commentary continues to focus on the ephemeral Job Openings category it shouldn’t. Though Job Openings declined sharply by just about 300,000 in the current estimate (from a slight downward revision of July) it still rates as completely out of alignment with the rest of the JOLTS [...]
The problem with using GDP as the primary means of economic accounting is its very nature. By attempting both comprehensiveness and precision, the resulting calculation is an agglomeration of various methods and sources, many of which are quite dynamic apart from static regressions. By that construction alone, GDP is susceptible to high degrees of kurtosis where assumptions find little. In [...]
On a day when the Fed will likely overshadow everything with unearned attentiveness, the BLS released its annual benchmark for the Establishment Survey. Actually, it was just the preliminary estimate for the coming benchmark revision, which was curiously downward. It bears repeated that the BLS does not estimate the total count of either employed persons or payrolls but rather each [...]
Typically when any statistic gets way out ahead of itself it will eventually revert toward its prior state. That is the nature of stochastic modeling in economic accounts and it presents a great weakness. It is not unshared, however, as that is nothing more than recency bias applied to a quite dynamic world. The great flaw in any stochastic model [...]
There are only two numbers in the monthly payroll report that have any meaning, and both came up quite short yet again. The first, as always, is the labor force itself as that population estimate more than any other indicates the relative station of the US economy. There has never been any time in recorded economic history where economic growth [...]
Today’s release of personal income and spending is very much related to the revised GDP figures, though I have no doubt that the BEA wishes it were not. To start with, the ongoing chain of benchmark revisions has produced an inordinately volatile set of economic accounts. That is quite against the stated purpose of all this adjusting and statistical intrusiveness; [...]
Lost in the euphoria over second quarter GDP revisions is the ongoing corporate struggle in terms of profits and how that suggests a more than reasonable proportion of GDP’s ability to measure the economy is overstated. To this point, I had focused more so on the productivity problems as they related to a potential over-optimism of the labor market but [...]
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