The BLS released its labor turnover data, or JOLTS, earlier today. There have been two main issues with it, starting with Job Openings (JO) which is widely cited along with the unemployment rate to represent the widely reported labor shortage theory. More controversial has been Quits, lately dubbed in the media as the Great Resignation for a variety of presumed [...]
The Beveridge Curve was a useful guide for checking the intuitive relationship between the economic demand for labor and the actual use of it. Downward sloping, what it implies is that as more companies demand more labor the less unemployment there should be. No duh, right?Because of this fundamental relationship, we might also use the Beveridge Curve in order to [...]
The latest JOLTS survey from the BLS suggests nothing much has changed from that particular view of the labor market. The level of estimated Job Openings (JO) while down slightly over the last few months remains exceedingly high. By contrast, the rate of monthly Hires (HI) continues to be subdued, if at the high end of its recent range extending [...]
The updated estimates from the BLS for its JOLTS data largely confirm observations from other labor markets figures. The rate of Job Openings in November 2016 was slightly more than October, but still not appreciably different than what it has been over the past two years. The JOLTS survey indicated Job Openings first reached 5.5 million for the first time [...]
The BLS reported that the rate of hiring in the US continues to be sluggish and sideways. Total hiring across the labor market was estimated to be 5.08 million (SA) in September, down from August and the second slowest rate this year. Since first surpassing 5 million back in September 2014, the overall pace of employer engagement has been largely [...]
In all honesty, I could start almost any piece I write with the phrase “economists are stumped.” It has become something of a baseline where there is some element or condition of the global economy that doesn’t make sense to them. The latest update in JOLTS for July continues to be faithful to the seeming contradiction. By view of the [...]
The latest JOLTS update finds total hires in January down by a rather large 372k, leaving the monthly seasonally-adjusted rate at still 5 million. Given that the estimated hires rate increased unusually in December, it seems as if January was the statistical catchup or seasonal give-back. That leaves intact the same sideways pattern that first appeared around October 2014. Throughout [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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