A few quick and dirty #CPSMicrodataDay charts, as I ponder other ones.
According to the household survey, broad labor market disruption fell by 8 million people in May, but there are still 32 million people who have left jobs or had their hours involuntarily cut since February. /1
We need to be very cautious about CPS data right now, but one interesting result: median same-worker wage growth hasn't slowed significantly yet, either on an hourly or weekly basis.
That's not what we would expect in such a sharp downturn, though perhaps this takes time. /2
That said, non-raise rates are rising, though note this series is noisy and the 12-month moving average I use will necessarily only change slowly. /3
But--and this is why we need to be more cautious these days--response rates are plunging, widening the uncertainty bands around the data. /4
Moreover, in-person interviews are plunging too (for utterly defensible reasons!), but in-person interviews consistently yield higher unemployment rates for some reason, so this shift may be having a compositional effect on the CPS, though I'm sure BLS has tried to adjust. /FIN
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This is a treading water jobs report at 114K, which is almost exactly the number of jobs we mechanically need to add to keep up with the labor force.
But it's probably weaker than that since there will likely be future downward benchmark revisions. /1
First the good news. We should never focus on a single month. The 3MMA is +170K/month, which is solid and nonrecesssionary. And an unemployment rate at 4.3% is consistent with estimates of medium-and-long-run trend. An economy that landed here would be fine. /2
Today, I have a short @The_Budget_Lab piece on the "No Tax on Tips Act" that puts the bill in the context of today's labor market and tax system. There are three important takeaways. /1 budgetlab.yale.edu/news/240624/no…
First, tipped work is not very common, even among low wage workers. There were 4 million workers in tipped occupations in 2023. That's 2 1/2 % of all employment, 4% of workers in the bottom half of hourly wages, and 5% of workers in the bottom quartile. /2
Second, tipped workers skew young: 1/3 of tipped workers are under 25, compared to only 12% of non-tipped workers. 13% of tipped workers are teenagers (versus only 3% for non-tipped). /3
Real GDP growth came in at 1.6% in Q1, softer than expected. But that appears to be driven by weakness in volatile components, especially net exports. Private domestic final purchases--"core GDP" made up of consumption & fixed investment--grew 3.1%, a very strong print.
The chart below shows how much broad components of GDP contributed to grown in Q1, 2023 Q4, and on average over 2017-19. You can see the significant swing in exports. Goods consumption also cooled a bit. Services consumption and residential investment firmed.
The reason economists look at PDFP in tandem with overall GDP is that PDFP is actually better at predicting next quarter's GDP than GDP itself. Inventories and trade are volatile and add noise to forecasts. So PDFP is not "actual GDP" but it's a better measure of underlying trend
This was a strong report, and both surveys were aligned. Payroll employment grew 303K in March, with +22K net revisions. The 3M mov avg is now +276K.
Household employment grew 498K, and by 352K on a payroll basis (the household survey has far wider error bands).
Meanwhile, year-on-year nominal hourly wage growth is cooling: it came in at 4.1%; incidentally, exactly what March's 3-month annualized growth was too.
We don't have inflation data for March yet, but March YY wage growth was almost certainly positive in real terms.
The Producer Price Index (PPI) is always a difficult release to interpret. CPI and PCE are better measures of consumer prices, (though the latter takes some subindices from PPI); for example, CPI and PCE include imports and housing, both of which PPI exclude. /1
That said, PPI is no slouch on interesting data.
Contrary to the way it's often described, the headline PPI measure (PPI Final Demand) is *not* an input cost index. It's an index of seller's final prices. But PPI *does* have input cost indices, called "Intermediate Demand":
That chart shows input costs by the type of input: unprocessed goods (eg fresh fruit meant to be canned, crude petroleum meant to be processed), processed goods (eg wood pulp, cotton yarn), services (eg renting a warehouse), & construction. /3