Expecting Poor Employment Data
Here at "A Dash" one of our specialties is labor economics. While most take a superficial perspective, we try to educate readers about labor dynamics.
You do not see this on TV, nor in the regular MSM sources.
Some Facts
Do you know these facts?
- There are currently about 3 million job openings;
- Job creation is about 100K jobs for each business day.
- The battle of new jobs versus old jobs is still being lost.
Our Analysis
Each month we look at various economic indicators, all concurrent with the monthly BLS payroll survey. We are careful to use data from exactly the same week.
Our results have been weaker than the BLS series in recent months, but the revisions have moved closer to our predictions.
Let us emphasize again that this is not a forecast. It identifies a result from a survey of the week in April including the 12th of the month, a result consistent with other data from the same time frame.
We expect net job losses of about 680,000, worse than the market call of -620K. The sampling error for the survey is +/- 100K or so. The punditry will ignore this and read deep meaning into the results. In particular, they will look a subsets, which also have huge margins of error. They will spin the data as much worse, citing the BLS job creation adjustments, even though these have consistently improved results.
Investment Conclusion
Investors in recent months have seemed to understand that there are big job losses and that this is a lagging indicator. The reaction to recent negative reports has been benign.
Having said this, the data may seem to conflict with the more recent "green shoots" interpretations about the economy. Do not expect more support for this thesis from employment.