JOLTS: 1/ Hiring was a little on the soft side in June, but generally the main turnover indicators have been stable for some time. Cooling has been on pause since summer/fall 2024 and limited evidence that it has resumed.
2/ As stated earlier, hiring was on the soft side. A hiring rate of 3.3% is comparable to early 2012 levels, when the unemployment rate was a little over 8%. But there's a pretty good chance it's just noise around a stable, weak hiring trend.
3/ Quits are stable at 2.0% - around 2015-16 levels, when the unemployment rate was at just over 5%. People know job opportunities are limited, and are staying put as a result.
1/ Continuing claims a bit higher than I thought they would be, though still not that concerning.
We're probably going to be on a flattish trajectory in the published series for the remainder of the year due to residual seasonality.
2/ That flattish trajectory in the published series is an overly benign portrayal of what is actually happening in the underlying data, which is an ongoing slow creep upward.
3/ Initial claims continue to run below year-ago levels. We're still in the Hurricane Beryl base effect window so I'll want to wait a little longer before I declare that layoffs are coming down...
2/ Without taking future revisions into account, we’ve had a similar trajectory to the unemployment rate in the first 5 months of this year with 124K/mo (vs 180K/mo a year earlier.)
Consider future revisions into account and we’re probably talking 154K vs 59K.
3/ I am in general mildly pessimistic about the labor market trajectory - I don’t intend to be a Pollyanna here.
But a lot of the slowing in employment growth is coming from the supply side, not the demand side.
Business Trends & Outlook Survey from the Census Bureau:
1/ Employers are becoming slightly less pessimistic, relative to a year earlier, about future headcount (probably reflecting less-high tariffs).
We haven't seen actual behavior (modestly contractionary) change much since
2/ The improvement in headcount plans (relative to a year ago) is coming from fewer firms planning to cut headcount, and more firms planning to expand it.
Again, they are more pessimistic than 5-6 months ago - but less pessimistic than 1-2 months ago.
3/ A slightly smaller share of employers are currently/recently expanding headcount, relative to a year ago. The share of employers cutting headcount is unchanged relative to a year ago.
1/ TL;DR: We are very likely going to get large negative downward revisions to the growth of non-farm employment in the year from March 2024 to March 2025.
2/ To recap: the QCEW is the source data for the annual benchmark revision to nonfarm payroll employment.
The next benchmark date is March 2025. We'll get a preliminary estimate in late summer. We'll get the final benchmark revision in early February 2026.
3/ As of this morning, we have 3 quarters of the QCEW data that will constitute the benchmark source data.
QCEW data are noisy. They're also, themselves, subject to revisions (more later). So this is speculative based on 3 rather than the full 4 quarters. Nevertheless...