Jobs

The 172k rise in July private sector payrolls was well above the consensus forecasts and the best showing in 5 months. Hourly earnings rose 0.1% and the work week was unchanged. After a string of disappointing news this is surely,…

This daily will have to be quick since I am in transit. The best highlight here is jobless claims and how the auto sector is affecting both production and employment positively, potentially keeping the US from falling into outright…

We first noticed the first signs that the economy was beginning to soften about three months ago. Now the evidence of a slowdown has become so overwhelming that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are headed for a recession. We…

I want to highlight three articles on the issue of jobs and full employment because they give one a view of the employment issue from various angles. First is the brief history of unemployment in Britain covering data from 1855. What we see…

Retail sales are at recessionary levels right now, having dropped for a third consecutive month. I need to flag the inventories data that came out this morning in the US as the only thing between us and outright recession.

Scott Barber of Reuters shows us with the chart below that over the last 30 years bad debt in Spain has tracked unemployment and moved inversely with GDP growth. The higher the percentage of doubtful loans is, the lower GDP growth and the…

The US employment report was simply terrible. Adding insult to injury the April was revised lower as well. The dollar initially firmed, but as participants consider the risks of QE3, the upside momentum stalled.

There has been a lot of back and forth by academic economists on monetary policy. The reason is two-fold. First, during the so-called Great Moderation many economists increasingly looked to monetary over fiscal policy for countercyclical…

I wrote you last week after the third consecutive elevated jobless claims report, saying this was a definite harbinger of a weak jobs report. This has proved true. While March's gain of 120,000 jobs was revised up to 154,000 and…

Note the peak in manufacturing jobs in June 1977, which represented 22 percent of all nonfarm payrolls, then, to fall to less than 9 percent of total employment today. It’s too earlier to claim victory with the current recovery in the…