These two graphs from this morning’s jobs report (with my annotation) tell the story of where we are:
The first is unemployment, which downshifted from around 10% to 9% earlier this year, where it’s been stuck ever since. Remember, full employment is around 5%, so we’re stuck in a tough place.
The second is the average monthly change in payroll employment growth, where you can pretty clearly see the deceleration in growth. From around 2010q3 to April of this year, we added an average of around 160K jobs per month, enough to at least slowly nudge the jobless rate down. Since then, it’s been 72K per month.
And then there are those headwinds I mentioned earlier—basically, both here and in Europe, we’re starving for policy solutions, said solutions are across the room on the table, where they’re being left on the table by a dysfunctional politics that is implicitly accepting the unacceptable.
We have achieved shaky stability.
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE
PAYROLLS, MONTHLY CHANGE IN THOUSANDS
Source: BLS Sept jobs report, my annotations.
I found this interesting.. any comments?
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11271494/1/the-1-job-statistic-no-one-is-paying-attention-to.html?cm_ven=RSSFeed
The principal drag on jobs now are from the public sector, and those are tied to annual budget cycles. Teachers, the #1 public sector jobs victims, are on August-May schedules so we’re not likely to see a burst of public-sector layoffs for several months. Other public-sector job cuts are more closely tied to the State budget cycles which aren’t uniform and may dribble in.
Since October is a quarter boundary month, we may see some hints of hiring patterns over the next quarter from the private sector come November.
Hi Jared,
I just want to say God bless you who is working on behalf of have Nots. Please keep fighting never think you are alone. We all are with with.
Regards
Thank you!
Who says full employment is 5%? We got down below 4% in 2000 with not much of an increase in inflation. Didn’t the Clinton-era experience blow a hole in the NAIRU concept — and, for that matter, expose it as a construct of finance types who want fighting inflation — protecting the value of the debts they are owed — to take priority over full employment (in direct contravention of the clear language of the applicable law)?
Good question–I’ll speak to this later.