Benchmark revisions have visited the BLS JOLTS survey, too. And yes, they’ve been smoothed. To that end, the hawkishly-watched Job Openings (JO) trend has been altered. Before this week’s release, JO had peaked like the Establishment Survey back last summer and had seemed to soften since. Now, JO continues on an upward bend rather than downward.For JOLTS Hires (HI), the [...]
Most people have the impression that these various payroll and employment reports just go into the raw data and count up the number of payrolls and how many Americans are employed. Perhaps the BLS taps the IRS database as fellow feds, or ADP as a private company in the same data business of employment just tallies how many payrolls it [...]
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 [...]
What a time to forget it was the month for yearly benchmark revisions. After making a huge deal out of these spread across all kinds of economic accounts put together by various government agencies, I hadn’t remembered how February each year the BLS makes its contributions to correcting economic records for the payroll and employment data. So, I wrote this [...]
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary commitment. I never set out nor imagined that a quarter century after embarking on what I thought would be a career managing portfolios, researching markets, and picking investments, I’d instead have to spend a good amount of my time in the future taking apart how raw economic data is collected, tabulated, and then disseminated. Yet [...]
Of course inflation numbers, the PCE Deflators for June 2021, but first in the same report as those the BEA also released its various data on income and spending. In the former category, income, we’ll find a big reason why this deviation for consumer prices most likely ends up as temporary. And before we can get to that, big benchmark [...]
The FOMC held a meeting and that can only mean dots. These are the individual policymaker’s views on where the federal funds target range might end up down the road. The latest update for the June 2021 central bank conclave shows several more voting members projecting the first rate hikes to begin toward the end of next year, a supposedly [...]
Why do economic data providers continue to overstate reflationary periods? This is more substantial than a pet peeve, though to many if not most it might seem like splitting hairs. We’ve seen this happen repeatedly with each eurodollar cycle. The more egregious economic overstatements were definitely 2014’s, the data errors contributing at least something to the confusion and narrative mistake, [...]
It’s about time. I’ve been writing for years that the payroll reports are, mostly, irrelevant. That’s never how they are received, though, some months wherein the new low for the unemployment rate or the blowout headline payroll figure send risk markets soaring. Not this month. Can you imagine what the last couple of reports would have done a year ago? [...]
President Trump mentioned the unemployment rate seven times during his third State of the Union address delivered on Tuesday. It was obvious why he did (though I had expected twice that number). His reelection largely stands on where enough people believe the economy stands. He was, after all, elected four years ago to fix what had been a very real [...]
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