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 number of Job Openings for the month of July were revised upward, the BLS now thinking there had been more than 11 million of them during that month. Companies seem to be desperate for workers, at least judging by this one measure. The latest estimate for August 2021 came in well short of either the revised figure (11.1 million) [...]
In Massachusetts, the Federal Reserve’s First District, restaurateurs have struggled mightily to find workers. As part of the central bank’s Beige Book, one contact of the Boston leadership said the industry was “facing the worst labor shortage he has seen in 35 years of experience.” In response to such a major threat, these firms become truly creative to try to [...]
COVID-19 is a 2020 story and not so much one for 2021. Pretty much everyone, however, will be seeking to make it that way. To begin this week a stark reminder of that promise: vaccine-phoria. While that unleashed a curiously narrow risk and reflation frenzy, the fact that it wasn’t more widespread speaks to this disparity.A vaccine doesn’t really change [...]
You can see it in the GDP numbers, even before they were revised. Globally synchronized growth was always less impressive than what it was made out to be. It’s as true overseas as in the US. The upswing was endlessly hyped, but there was so much less behind it in reality. Reflation #2 was a whole lot better than Reflation [...]
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 latest updates for the JOLTS showed that job openings in April surged to a new series high. Jumping by 267k (seasonally adjusted), the trend in job openings is being used as confirmation that there must be some robust underlying trend in overall payrolls despite the ubiquitous slump everywhere else. In other words, this is another series from the BLS [...]
I suppose there is more than one way to interpret K-Mart’s decision to air the first Christmas ad 105 days before the actual holiday, but to most sane people it was a sign of creeping pessimism. Retailers have already been behind in their sales expectations for much of the first half of the year, despite relatively uniform optimism at the [...]
The curious case of the jobs survey dichotomy continues. While the mainstream focus on the Establishment Survey’s “steady growth” trend provides cover for the FOMC to contemplate scaling back their interventions (and thus the frothy/bubbly foundation), it is fully alone in its interpretation of the jobs situation. The Household Survey has diverged both in quantity and, more importantly, quality. Now [...]
Chairman Bernanke stole the show yesterday, certainly by his accommodative and now contradictory stand. I suppose that is the danger in trying to talk “markets” toward “targets”, much like Greenspan in the late 1990’s. Toward that end, he made at least one prediction that will likely come true (in sharp contrast to the Fed’s history), namely that the unemployment rate [...]
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