Popular Economics Weekly
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 227,000 in November, and the unemployment rate changed little at 4.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment trended up in health care, leisure and hospitality, government, and social assistance. Retail trade lost jobs.
It looks like the American economy that so many voters thought was not working for them has now brought the unemployment rate down to 4.2 percent from its 14.8 percent high in April 2020 (peak of red line in graph) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is despite the labor strikes by Boeing employees, East Coast dockworkers, railroad workers and several hurricanes that devastated parts of the south.
President Biden touted the results in the next to last unemployment report of his administration. It took much longer to get there after the Great Recession (large gray bar) in the FRED graph dating from 2010 that included the Obama and first Trump administrations.
"America’s comeback continues," he said in a statement. "Today’s report shows that the economy created 227,000 jobs in November, as Boeing machinists returned to work with record wage gains and hurricane recovery continued. Unemployment of 4.2% is in the same low range of the past seven months. This has been a hard-fought recovery, but we are making progress for working families."
Hurricanes Milton and Helene prevented more than a half million people from going to work in October, said MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash, but most of them were back on the job last month. The number of people who said they could not work because of bad weather in November fell to just 62,000 from 512,000 in the prior month.
Almost all sectors showed job increases: Education/Health +79,000, Leisure/hospitality +53,000, Government +33,000, and manufacturing + 22,000 in payroll jobs.
This could not have happened without the various policies enacted over the past four years of the Biden Administration when more than 15 million jobs were created that brought the American economy out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst natural disaster in more than 100 years.
The truth is that it could have been much worse if the pandemic recovery hadn’t been a public/private collaboration. The $5 trillion in the various Bidenomics’ legislation enacted by a bipartisan congress put those investments into productive enterprises, such as modernizing our infrastructure and manufacturing base, as well as mitigating the results of global warming by investing in alternative energies like solar, EVs and wind generation.
Many Americans have suffered horrendously from the hurricanes and record number of tornadoes that have devastated parts of the south and Midwest. Climate change has not proven to be a ‘hoax’, so I am hopeful that the upcoming Republican administration in their drive for more efficiency will not eliminate those programs that have helped these regions to recover. Many of the worst-hit areas are in Republican-run red states.
All eyes are now riveted on whether the Federal Reserve will drop interest rates another 0.25 percent in its December FOMC meeting, which will boost growth further.
Prominent economist Mohamed El-Erian has described today's jobs release as "a somewhat strong report, but not consistently strong," adding that it should pave the way for an interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve later this month.
"It is strong on the earnings side. It is strong on the labor participation coming down side -- less supply -- and is also strong on a small beat," he told Bloomberg TV. "But the fact that the unemployment rate went up means that the Fed will be comfortable cutting by 25 basis points, means that the market will increase the probability of this happening. So on the policy front, this did not complicate what would have been a messy situation."
I am also hopeful after COVID-19 that the next administration will know enough not to cut too much meat off the government’s bone that’s managing our healthcare system when another natural disaster might loom, such as a bird-flu pandemic that scientists are now saying is a possibility.
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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