Jobs

The jobs report released at 8:30 this morning was as a good a report as we could expect, more than ten years into the US economic expansion. The headline March numbers were an increase of 196,000 conform payrolls and an unemployment rate…

Yesterday's climbdown by the Federal Reserve on both interest rate policy and balance sheet reduction was not enough to satisfy the market's disquiet about the US economy. Equity markets sold off and US Treasury yields rallied as the…

Real quick here. I saw the jobless claims data today and thought they looked pretty good. But, I decided to go back to my 2008-2009 practice of sifting through the raw data for both initial claims and continuing claims. The numbers weren't…

It took the dramatic downshift in non-farm payrolls today for people to wake up to the drip-drip of weak jobs data coming out of the US. This put the equity market into a funk and caused bond yields to sink back to where they were on…

The February 2019 Non-Manufacturing ISM data were very bullish. Both the headline and the major subindices showed a lot of strength. And for me that indicates the 0.3% number on the Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker will move up markedly as more…

I have a number of threads to address here. The first is that we got two big pieces of economic data out of the US this morning, one backward looking and the other coincident or forward looking. And I want to break down. My overall take is…

For the past several years, I have been trying to write more about outcomes and less about theories and policy prescriptions. But, like anyone, I have a core set of beliefs on economics and a lot more. Economics is not a science; it is a…

The Federal Reserve's about-face on rates between December and January looks a lot more rational in the context of the US economic data released today. We saw US retail sales unexpectedly fall in December, posting the worst drop in nine…

I just got this via email from the US Labor Department: In the week ending February 2, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 234,000, a decrease of 19,000 from the previous week's unrevised level of 253,000. The…

In the US stock market, technology stocks are leading the rally from the deeply oversold levels in December. And that has a lot of people thinking the worst is over. But this is just a relief rally. The real economy is actually…