Greece; Fabulous US employment/ISM data
Lots of conflicting news re Greece. To summarise: Rumours that the acting PM (Papademos) was going to resign – denied. He has called for a meeting of all political parties for this weekend; The Euro group meeting scheduled for Monday has been postponed – no new date set, though thought to be later in the...
No Rick Santelli and Zero Hedge, One Million People Did Not Drop Out of the Labor Force Last Month
SilverOz is an MPA specializing in local economic development and have worked in local economic development for a mid-sized midwestern county for over 10 years. He has personally worked on/managed projects that have totaled over $500 million in direct investment into the county. ~~~ So today following an otherwise pretty darn good jobs report, we...
The Hiring Hare Will Soon Morph Into a Tortoise
Hiring looks like a rabbit, but expect job growth to shift into a slower pace soon.
After the Tape: Checking the Start-Up Engine
The effect of a lack of business formations, or "births," is particularly acute in January, as the jobs report out Friday showed.
What’s Behind the Unemployment Rate Drop?
Whenever the unemployment rate drops, economically savvy observers know to ask a key question: What happened to the employment-population ratio?
Tearing Apart January 2012 NFP data
Despite the cries of the permabears and Rick Santelli, this was unequivocally a strong NFP report. The headline numbers were 243,000 net jobs, as unemployment dipped to 8.3%. The Labor Pool increased — suggesting that the improvement was not the usual employee retirement and discouraged worked giving up looking for work. When we go beneath...
Economists React: Jobs Report ‘Positive in Every Way’
Economists and others weigh in on the increase in jobs and drop in the unemployment rate.
Did Economy Really Create 500,000 Jobs?
According to one little-followed measure, the economy created nearly 500,000 jobs last month -- about twice as many as the government’s official figure of 243,000.
Vital Signs: Falling Jobless Claims Decline
The number of workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits—an indicator of the pace of layoffs—fell by 12,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 367,000.
NFP: Outliers Are Where Investing Risks Lay
Today we find out just how seasonal those 200,000 new jobs were in December 2011. Consensus is for employment to grow by 140,000 — about par with population growth. Unemployment is expected to be unchanged at 8.5%. As I am so fond of writing, no single month’s NFP matters all that much — focus on...
Five Long-Term Unemployment Questions
Tomorrow is (yet again) NFP day. While everyone is worrying about whether the December numbers were merely seasonal, we should also consider some of the longer term trends in Unemployment. These have major repercussions for Retail Sales and the ongoing Housing Weakness. Fortunately, Pew Trusts gave us a full overview: > How Long Have the...
Strong Factory Hiring? Don’t Bet On It
"More factory workers!" It's one campaign slogan Democrats and Republicans agree on. There's just one problem. U.S. factory jobs have been on a structural downtrend, and government policy can't change that.
