It wasn’t all that long ago when the media began to fill itself up with one story after another about how huge looming inflationary pressures were causing the entire “market” to rethink its lengthy and determined anti-reflationary stance. Back in March, for instance, S&P had joined this chorus by zeroing in on eurodollar futures, of all instruments, and coming back [...]
April 2021’s payroll estimate (CES) was the “bad” one; at a revised +278,000 it was “supposed” to have been significantly better than the “good” one for March (+785,000, revised). Near three hundred thousand in any month before 2020 would’ve been celebrated as a near miracle (that’s just how bad the labor market has been for a long time). What made [...]
We got another disappointing employment report last week. Well, that's what everyone said anyway, that the complete WAG by the BLS that the US economy added 559,000 jobs in May was below expectations and disappointing. I suppose it is a tad disappointing but I find it hard to lament the fact that a half-million Americans found jobs last month. There [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Why isn’t the inflation monster right upon us? Well, for one, central banks only pretend to do money. But setting that aside, it’s worth asking how even if they did do money, could inflation result given the current conditions? Hard no.It’s a combination of enormous macro slack joining destructive forces with the underside of the permanent income hypothesis. The point [...]
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), [...]
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