A couple of things struck me about today’s jobs report. One was the regularity of the straight line trend in non farm payrolls. I mean, even casual observers know that markets and the economy move in trends, (which are your friends) but come on! This steady state 1.6% annual gain for the past 4 years…
Today’s report on first time unemployment claims was a nothing-burger. It was a worse report than usual for this week of the year, but the year to year change was right in line. Whether this week’s poor showing versus the same week last year and the 10 year average is a canary in the coal…
One of the off-the-wall theories that I have espoused lately is that rather than slowing because of the winter weather, the US economy is actually beginning to overheat as it enters the final stages of a free money boom that has benefitted the few at the expense of the many.
The US economy is a big lumbering behemoth consisting of hundreds of millions of actors and billions of transactions every day. It has a life of its own, an inertia against which all of the Fed’s policy manipulations are insanely meaningless.
Here’s a brief review of the charts from a few of last week’s economic data releases. JOLTS The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey reported 4.12 million job openings (actual- not seasonally adjusted) in January, a 7.4% increase over January 2013. The growth rate has ranged from 6% to 11% over the past…
Misleading Employment Data Can Still Sometimes Lead To Correct Conclusion Yes, we know that the nonfarm payrolls headline number for January was wrong, but those who concluded that job growth is weak are correct. It just was not as weak in January as they thought. The real problem, and tragedy, lies in the fact that…
Nonfarm Payrolls Bogus Data The nonfarm payrolls headline number for January was hogwash, thanks to a defective seasonal adjustment (SA) factor. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal treated the news. The WSJ pointed out that “Economists had expected a gain of 189,000 jobs…” so this was a huge miss. The Journal’s reporter added that, “December…
The headline number for seasonally finagled initial unemployment claims for the week ended February 1 were about where Wall Street economists expected. The actual numbers were also in line with the average performance for the last week of January. The Department of Labor reports the actual, NSA data, but the mainstream media ignores it. Here’s what the DOL…
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) Pending Home Sales Index (PHSI) number for December fell by 8.7%, crushing clueless Wall Street economists whose consensus guess was for a decline of 0.2%. The headline number is a seasonally adjusted representation of the trend, and may or may not reflect actual market conditions at the time. Actual…
Initial unemployment claims for the week ended January 25 were worse than Wall Street economists expected based on the seasonally adjusted headline number. The actual number of initial claims, not seasonally adjusted, for this week of January was 354,604, a drop of 59,700 from the prior week. The average decline for the fourth week of…
