Just a remarkable jobs report on virtually all the metrics that should matter, especially if you look through the details. Gonna try to thread all my thoughts in one place this time around.
The Prime-Age 25-54 Employment Rate adjusts for 1) aging and 2) changes in participation.
It reached a new cyclical high, highest in 22yrs.
Biden has already seen 10 months at 80%+
For comparison:
Trump: 7 months
Obama: 0 months
GWB: 18 months
Clinton: 56 months
Given where the labor market was in the United States was in January 2021 (substantially deeper hole than most OECD countries, not as much low-hanging fruit)...
The scale of the prime-age employment recovery has been remarkable.
Blows every other recovery out the water
Folks who tell you that labor force participation (LFPR) is the critical variable need to take note:
Gains in age-adjusted participation coincide w/ (and are driven by) outright employment gains.
Prime-age LFPR made another historic high. We are not "running out of workers"
To the extent that we should disfavor part-time underemployment and favor full-time jobs, the quality of jobs in this recovery has also been strong.
Prime-age *FULL-TIME* employment rates made yet another high!
0.4% gain from 72.2% to 72.6%. Way better than last two decades.
This recovery simply doesn't have the generationally disastrous qualities of the previous two recoveries.
The 2000s recovery was basically left incomplete.
The 2010s recovery took over a decade
The prime-age employment rate among black and African American persons has been rocketing up, another 0.3% gain from March to April.
Now at 78.4%, just shy of its January 1999 high of 78.8%
So much about this recovery and expansion worth celebrating...*and defending*
It's not as if employment gains among one group have come at the expense of other groups.
We are generally seeing a rising tide lift all groups, but especially powerful for those historically marginalized
Employment differentials keep narrowing, and are historically narrow
Coming into this report, biggest concern was in the "Permanent job losers" data that tracks layoff dynamics. (Job growth is about hiring vs layoffs)
The risk was rising layoffs might snowball, but permanent job losers fell in April, as did the # of people near-term unemployment
Prime-age 25-54 employment rate for women just cleared its April 2000 historical peak.
US remains a laggard vs advanced economies. Given likely household production incidence, need changes to both norms & policies to sustainably support further gains academic.oup.com/sf/article/97/…
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This paper immediately made the rounds b/c it got all 50 states right w/ a model based on "fundamentals"
Kudos to them on the favorable prediction
But I think some lay readers might miss that "fundamentals" encompasses more than economic data
Worth digging a little deeper 🧵
The fundamental economic data they rely on is the Philly Fed Coincident Index, an composite of labor market, manufacturing, and real income data available at the national and state-level data
Here's what the year-over-year change in the Index looks like
The authors use a weighted average of the monthly readings through the presidential term. Likely from the month of Inauguration to the June of the election.
Their weights are in an unpublished appendix.
So I followed the cited approach to replicate their model input
Payrolls: Great! But more a sign of lower layoffs in Jan than a hiring uptick (seasonal adj issues here)
Wages: Still solid real wage gains but not spike reflects how weather effects on workweek distort data
Prime age employment: Nice bounce but wanna see more soon
False start...now we're up and running
A nice bounce in the prime-age employment rate, which already adjusts for changes in (1) participation and (2) aging
But even so, it doesn't reverse December's decline. Still 0.3% below peak vs July
Still looks like a slowing labor market
The household survey looks weaker when we look at the subset of full-time employment, which naturally controls for part-time underemployment issues. Another decline, now down YoY
No labor market statistic has a monopoly on the truth. Good to take an avg across hot and cold data.
We have 6-7 months of solid core disinflation to point to. It's fantastic, but there are still potential bumps in the road. Let's get a clean 12 months in first, especially given residual seasonality.
Not yet time for decisive retrospectives
1. If people can’t agree on what everyone else meant by “transitory,” the debate is futile Healthy debate requires mutual intelligibility and charity.
Instead, there's plenty of confusion about what each person meant explicitly, leave aside implicitly
Today's numbers aren't a basis for outright pessimism but they do signal the need for caution
Even looking beyond distortions due to the UAW strike, trends in job/wages/hours are cooler across both surveys
Fed needs to take notice & avoid overtightening
Nonfarm payroll employment is most frequently cited for job growth:
October readings were held down by the UAW strike, but the hidden story was the downward revision to the previous two months' jobs numbers.
Underlying job growth is still solid in the survey but it's slowing
The household survey shows weaker job growth
Prime-age employment rates (which acct for participation, aging) declined again. Full-time also weaker
Similar decline occurred last fall (before reverting). Could just be bad seasonal adjustment but warrants elevated caution rn
1.1% through lower costs as per its specific PPI deflator
Construction costs blew out in 2021-22 for a variety of reasons (hot housing market, covid-zero affecting supply chains, Olympic blue affecting building material supply, etc). All of that depressed business construction capex
Supply chain healing now helping the trajectory here