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Greed Beats Fear – For Now

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The the sun beats out beads of sweat and the kids laze at home without school to worry about. It’s summer, the season of loafing. Typically this is the time of year when there’s work to be done and jobs are plentiful but the stock market takes a gentle pause.

Not last year, and not this year. The stock market is hitting new highs as investors find US securities the safest and most promising investment on the planet. But just like last year, the pace of job growth is still not accelerating beyond the roughly 190k jobs created every month. It’s a decent pace, but not what we need to claw out way out of the six year hole and bring back the boom. Barataria called that one completely wrong.

It’s past time to get serious about income inequality – or really the lack of opportunity for those who don’t have money to invest.

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Pick a Number, Any Number

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With so much economic data showered on us every month, about the last thing anyone needs is another number. It’s hard enough to keep track of what’s going on as it is, so more measures of the economy are not helpful. That is, they aren’t helpful unless they give us a particular insight that can’t be gained anywhere else.

This is probably why the more comprehensive U6 unemployment hasn’t caught on against the headline U3 unemployment figure, despite the latter’s obvious deficiencies. Two numbers causes confusion, one gives us clarity. Still, with the changes that are taking place in the economy and the slowness of the recovery, it’s worth taking at least a passing glance at anything that might help us understand where things are going in the future. More to the point, with wonderful tools provided by the St Louis Federal Reserve we can run a lot of custom charts to see what makes sense.

Let’s give it a go.

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Jobs: Back to Even!

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According to ADP, the largest payroll processer in the US, the total number of private sector jobs made up the net loss in the last official recession last month. In January 2008 the total number of jobs stood at 116.0 million in January 2008, falling to 107.2 million by February 2010. The net loss of 8.8 million jobs was finally regained in March 2014 when we hit 116.1 million total. That includes 491 thousand gained so far in 2014.

If that’s not a good reason for a party, what is?

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Jobs, Unfrozen

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As Minnesota thaws out from a “polar vortex” that froze us colder than the North Pole (and the current location of the rover on Mars), there was some interesting news on jobs from all over the nation. Three stories of thawing and a little heat coming down give us all reason to be a little happy.

Spring is still months away, but let’s bask in the small improvements for a while. It beats huddling inside.

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Jobs Debate Heats Up

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The October Jobs Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) came out last Friday, and it was incredibly positive. 204k jobs were added by the official measure, enough to send the stock market up and make everyone happy. Well, not everyone. There were some strange features in this report that only accelerated the criticism of this report that started the month before and sharpened the political debate over jobs in the new economy.

Much of this is long overdue, but some of the criticism was weak and pointless all the same. Labor force participation has fallen from 63.2% of all workers to a 35 year low of 62.8% – a figure that may or may not be important. And anyone paying attention to the ADP Employment report has to question where the great news came from seeing as the latter had a gain of only 130k jobs. What on earth is going on?

The short answer is that everyone is starting to question everything. It’s a good thing – if we can sort it all out. Let’s give it a try.

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