The U.S civilian unemployment rate reached new lows of 3.6% in April – numbers last seen 51 years ago in 1968: There are a number of ways to use the national unemployment rate to signal recession, but almost all of them are co-incident to slightly lagging in the warning they provide. We have the most commonly used method which is annual growth of the unemployment rate, which has provided about six false positives since 1950 and can lag on occasion […]
Tag Archives | employment
Horrific revisions to HWOL data
The Conference Board Help-Wanted-Online (HWOL) program is closely followed by us to get a feel for the labor market. It is one of over two dozen labor indicators we examine. The monthly HWOL data have been produced by the Conference Board since May 2005, replacing the Help Wanted Advertising Index of print ads, which was published from 1951 to 2008. HWOL data contain the universe count of all ads posted online during a month, with a mid-month survey reference period […]
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Mixed Signals from Labor Market
We keep getting good news about employment and the labor market. But we rarely see the less optimistic numbers. THE GOOD Yellen’s Labor Dashboard (see here) is looking strong with all but 3 of the 9 components above pre-recession levels: The Employment Trend Index briefly wavered but now seems to be picking up steam again Weekly unemployment claims are recovering from a recent near-miss recession call: MIXED SIGNALS The popular unemployment numbers, by many different measures, seem to be bottoming-out […]
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Animation : The incredible US employment recovery
Below is an animation of the annual average unemployment rate per U.S state from 2011 onward. It’s quite incredible to see how unemployment was erased state-by-state over the years: However statewide improvements in employment have probably peaked-out as shown in the chart below, which depicts the aggregate (equal weighted) inverse 6-month unemployment rate growth for each of the 52 U.S States together with a diffusion showing the percentage of 52 U.S states with increasing unemployment. You can see that recently […]
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Yellen Labor Dashboard reaches target
“Full Employment” target reached Shortly after taking up office, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen used her “jobs data dashboard” to justify the Fed’s easy money policies and to argue there’s still considerable slack in the labor market five years after the recession’s end. Seven of the nine gauges on this dashboard had not recovered to levels reached before the last recession, reinforcing her belief that the economy would need “extraordinary support” from the Federal Reserve for “some time to come.” It […]
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Labor Market flags U.S Recession on horizon
Labor data last week surprised to the upside and pointed to an improvement in hiring and by implication the labor market. However, our leading Labor Market Growth Index, which tracks various diversified aspects of the general U.S labor market, experienced a sharp drop for the data representing the end of October 2013, to below the zero growth line. This is typically a signal for recession in 5-9 months time. However, we normally smooth the raw monthly data to cater for […]
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