household survey

Weekly Market Pulse: A Most Unusual Economy

By |2022-07-11T06:35:09-04:00July 10th, 2022|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Markets, Real Estate, Stocks|

The employment report released last Friday was better than expected but the response by bulls and bears alike was exactly as expected. Both found things in the report to support their preconceived notions about the state of the economy. I do think the bulls had the better case on this particular report but there have been plenty of others recently [...]

May Payrolls (and more) Confirm Slowdown (and more)

By |2022-06-03T17:59:03-04:00June 3rd, 2022|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

May 2022’s payroll estimates weren’t quite the level of downshift President Phillips had warned about, though that’s increasingly likely just a matter of time. In fact, despite the headline Establishment Survey monthly change being slightly better than expected, it and even more so the other employment data all still show an unmistakable slowdown in the labor market. What’s left open [...]

Neither Confusing Nor Surprising: Q1’s Worst Productivity Ever, April Decline In Employed

By |2022-05-09T20:01:38-04:00May 9th, 2022|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Maybe last Friday’s pretty awful payroll report shouldn’t have been surprising; though, to be fair, just calling it awful will be surprising to most people. Confusion surrounds the figures for good reason, though there truly is no reason for the misunderstanding itself. Apart from Economists and “central bankers” who’d rather everyone look elsewhere for the real problem. The Establishment Survey [...]

Far From Stellar, Employment Likely Went Negative In April

By |2022-05-06T18:04:27-04:00May 6th, 2022|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

It appears as if most reactions to today’s April 2022 payroll were quite positive, maybe enthusiastic when they should not have been. Though the Establishment Survey - the CES headline number most people pay attention to - gained 428,000 over March’s tally, it was the “other” one which crashed down like last week’s negative GDP thud.From the CES view, you [...]

A(nother) Waste of Our Time

By |2022-04-01T17:57:42-04:00April 1st, 2022|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

It’s been a while, but the BLS finally got around to releasing a near-perfect payroll report. These had been incredibly common even during prior downturns and near recessions, which should only raise questions about them. Among any immediate concerns, how relevant can these data points be?In our current day, like the consumer price data, they’re already old news. That’s not [...]

For The Fed, None Of These Details Will Matter

By |2022-03-04T18:20:16-05:00March 4th, 2022|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

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 [...]

BLS: We’ll Smooth The Payroll Data; ADP: Hold My Beer

By |2022-03-02T20:20:34-05:00March 2nd, 2022|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

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 [...]

Payrolls and Population, What A Mess

By |2022-02-04T15:02:37-05:00February 4th, 2022|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

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 [...]

Taper Discretion Means Not Loving Payrolls Anymore

By |2022-01-07T20:39:51-05:00January 7th, 2022|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money.The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it [...]

The Repeating Tides of Payroll And Inflation

By |2021-12-03T16:26:29-05:00December 3rd, 2021|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

There were all kinds of good news in the August payroll report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics would publish an acceleration in headline numbers, just about every one of them. The Establishment Survey “surged”, wage growth registered its largest annual increase in nearly a decade, while one broad measure of slack, U-6, tumbled to its lowest point since the start [...]

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