The ritual of payroll Friday really is a silly one. Everyone and the Fed claims to be data dependent and given the place the BLS is given in the hierarchy of data this one should be scrutinized heavily. But what sort of scrutiny? September 2019’s payroll report doesn’t fit neatly into clean, all-or-nothing interpretations. To begin with, no one seems [...]
The BLS giveth, and the BLS taketh away. That’s not really what has happened, of course, but for many it can seem that way. February’s payroll report obviously stands in striking contrast to January’s. The latter was a blowout, over +311k (revised), hyped near and far as proof of decoupling, the US economy the only clean shirt. In comes the [...]
Why aren’t more people talking about this? It’s a huge development and nary a peep anywhere. The mainstream media is filled with baited expectations for 3% wage growth on Payroll Friday. All eyes are on the labor market, which is a lagging indication, instead of on the oil market, which is forward looking. As of this writing, the futures curve [...]
December 2014 was something of a high-water mark. Early on in that month, the BLS had published payroll numbers (Establishment Survey) that to many confirmed the narrative. For the previous month, November, the US economy purportedly added a massive 321k new jobs. The media was predictably uncontrolled in its glee. Any survey of mainstream headlines for that particular report contains [...]
The payroll report missed badly, as the headline “job creation” number gained only 38k in May 2016. That was the lowest monthly gain of the entire “recovery.” Last month’s figure, which had already caused significant angst, was revised even lower to just 123k. The mainstream is predictably apoplectic, and why wouldn’t it be? After all, month after month after month [...]
As if something out of bad dream, the economy continues to shrink. Actually, the economy has been shrunken this whole time, it is only the full recovery narrative that has shriveled as each drastic data revision blasts apart what little is left of the positivity. We are made to believe that government data providers go out into the economy and [...]
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 [...]
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