The economic backdrop today: Employment is strong Employment drives personal consumption Initial Unemployment claims dropped by 18,000 to 202,000. This is the 4th lowest number of initial unemployment claims of the year. Continuing claims dropped as well and the slope of the 4-week moving average is now negative indicating an incrementally easier environment to find a new job. Today's ADP [...]
Private companies added 103,000 workers to payrolls in November. This disappointed as consensus was expecting 123,000 additions. Also, the October number was revised down by 7,000 jobs erasing some of the strength off September's 32 month low in hiring of 89,000. On an annual basis employment is growing 2.035% and continues to slow from the hiring surge of 2021 and [...]
A slight zig in the right direction versus September for both reports. ADP reported an addition of 113,000 jobs in October up from 89,000 in September. Even better, this was a steady increase throughout the month and not an isolated week. For the Jolts report, this number is a month stale. But it's a good one to look at because [...]
Remember the summer slowdown? Not last year’s, the first one. Back around July and August 2020 when what was supposed to have been a V-shaped recovery fell way off that trend. Instead, blamed on something with COVID, the US (and global economy) limped its way toward the end of that year just in time for its sugar-rush restart via helicopter.Twenty-twenty’s [...]
This will be written off as a temporary setback, and only then will anyone care if it follows in Friday’s payroll report. Just when the FOMC was counting on corroboration among all labor market data for its taper/balance sheet runoff/rate hike justification, this morning ADP threw a whole sack of wrenches in those plans. In the wake of the sack, [...]
It doesn’t really make much sense, does it? If you stop and think about it for more than a quick second, this notion of a labor shortage doesn’t get past the smell test. The economy overall is, we hear, booming. Really booming. And it’s booming in a way that has the labor market healing far faster than thought not long [...]
Score one big one for Governor Waller’s taper checklist. This particular FOMC member had, just a few days ago, speculated on continued large gains in US payrolls. A couple more on top of the last one, that being June, and it was his position the Federal Reserve would have to begin to seriously consider shifting course. He doesn’t mean to [...]
One good, one bad and by the end more the latter since the former simply bucked the trend, almost alone as an outlier (among outliers). The day started out with European deflationary pressures putting a spike on UST and related sovereign bond prices then quickly substantiated when ADP reported (830am EDT) its estimates for private payrolls during July (this was [...]
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 ISM reported its manufacturing index at highs on Monday, then today releases its non-manufacturing headline falling sharply. The result is an odd appendage to post-2008 history where these sentiment indicators are concerned; they are upside down to the usual configuration when it’s been more likely manufacturing suffers while services are to a greater extent immune to each successive suppressing [...]
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