Was tied up this morning, but #JOLTS looks interesting enough that it's worth a belated/abridged charts thread. I'm sure lots of others have already hit many of these points (looking at you, @nick_bunker, @DanielBZhao) but I can't resist.
Labor demand is clearly cooling. Job openings fell for the third straight month. Still high by historical standards, but now clearly falling (and quite rapidly).
The ratio of openings to unemployed workers hasn't been falling as steadily. But it's down to its lowest level since November 2021.
Quits aren't falling off a cliff, but they're also trending steadily down, suggesting workers are becoming more cautious about switching jobs.
The quits rate is now within two standard deviations of its prepandemic average (and only modestly above their prepandemic high). Openings still extremely high by historical standards, but falling rapidly.
Layoffs are still low by historical standards, but they're rising much more significantly than a few months ago. Hard to see in the total time series because of the pandemic spike, but clearer if you look at a truncated graph.
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CBO is out with its final cost estimate of the tax-and-spending bill passed by the House.
- Revenue ⬇️ by $3.7 trillion over 10 years
- Spending ⬇️ by $1.3 trillion
- Debt ⬆️ by $2.4 trillion over 10 years
- Uninsured pop. ⬆️ by 10.9 million in 2034
Full analysis: cbo.gov/publication/61…
The spending cuts mostly come from Medicaid ($344 billion over 10 years), food stamps and related programs ($295 billion) and the Affordable Care Act ($132 billion).
Note that these estimates don't take into account the macroeconomic impacts of the policy changes (it is not "dynamic" in wonk parlance). So to the extent tax/spending cuts affect economic growth, that will also affect revenues. CBO is working on an analysis that estimates these effects.
So this was an interesting finding from @NateSilver538, but one I found odd because @BLS_gov publishes CPI for regions (and for some metro areas) but not for states. So I dug into it a bit, and there's less here than meets the eye.
Nate's data is coming from this tracker from the @JECRepublicans. They don't have a state-level inflation estimate either, though. They just use BLS's estimate of regional inflation and apply it to an estimate of household spending when Biden took office. jec.senate.gov/public/index.c…
You can see this if you hover over their map (or download their data). States in the same region all have the same cumulative rates of inflation. But they differ in the amount of inflation experienced in dollar terms because some states have higher avg household incomes.
I hate that @ellawinthrop is leaving us, but I'm so glad I got to work with her on her last piece for @nytimesbusiness. She's the best, most collaborative, most creative visual journalist I've ever worked with. A thread with a few of my favorite Ben-and-Ella collabs:
Good news on inflation! U.S. consumer prices FELL 0.1 percent in June, and were up just 3 percent from a year earlier. "Core" prices, stripping out volatile food and fuel, were up 0.1 percent from May and 3.3 percent from last June. Data: …Live coverage: bls.gov/news.release/c… nytimes.com/live/2024/07/1…
This is the second straight month where there has been effectively no inflation on a month-to-month basis. Prices were flat in May, and down in June.
If you take a longer view here: At 3% year-over-year, inflation is no longer outside historical norms (though it is still higher than immediately prepandemic). And over the past three months, rents have risen at an annual rate of ***just 1.1%.***
Job openings ticked up in May (but only because April was revised down). Layoffs edged up. Quits basically flat. All consistent with a gradually slowing, but not collapsing, job market. #JOLTS
Full data: bls.gov/news.release/j…
There were 8.1 million job openings on the last day of May. That's up from 7.9 million in April, revised down from the 8.1m originally reported.
Larger story here is that openings are clearly falling quickly, even if they're still high in absolute terms. #JOLTS
There were 1.2 job openings for every unemployed worker in May. That's more or less where things stood immediately before the pandemic (when the labor market was widely viewed as strong but not overheated).
The U.S. economy slowed in the final three months of the year, but only because the Q3 number was so strong -- the 3.3% growth rate in Q4 was well above expectations and certainly offered no hints of a brewing recession. (Belated charts thread)
This is not a case where the volatile components of G.D.P. made a weak quarter look strong, as sometimes happens. Measures of underlying demand were also very strong.
For all the predictions of a recession, G.D.P. growth actually *accelerated* in 2023, and topped the prepandemic average growth rate as well.