October Employment Roars Back

 Popular Economics Weekly

MarketWatch

Who said the labor shortage is holding back job gains? Not for the moment. It looks like the roaring 2020s are beginning to roar in earnest this fall as we slowly exit the pandemic.

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 531,000 in October, and the unemployment rate edged down by 0.2 percentage point to 4.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

“Job growth was widespread, with notable job gains in leisure and hospitality, in professional and business services, in manufacturing, and in transportation and warehousing. Employment in public education declined over the month.”

People are returning to work, in part because 9 million lost jobless benefits in September as the federal extended unemployment insurance program was terminated.

The government revised the number of new jobs created in September to 312,000 from 194,000, based on new information from the businesses surveyed, said MarketWatch. And the job gains in August were raised to 483,000 from 366,000.

A total of 5.6 million payroll jobs have been created this year to date and average hourly wages have increased 4.6 percent. President Biden touted that these numbers showed that the U.S. now had the fastest job growth in the developed world.

Leisure and Hospitality, Education & Health, and Professional/Business added 320,000 jobs, manufacturing and construction added 104,000 jobs, while governments lost 73,000 jobs (from a loss in public education).

The service sector is roaring back, in other words, as restaurants, hotels, theaters and other companies in the hospitality business created 164,000 new jobs last month.

The jump in payroll employment was presaged by a recent poll of senior business executives in service-oriented companies, such as retailers and banks that rebounded to a three-month high of 58.2 from 54.9 in September, IHS Markit said Friday.

A similar survey of manufacturing activity slipped to 59.2 from 60.7, but it was still quite high. Any reading over 50 signals growth and numbers are above 55 are exceptional.

CDC.gov

Another reason for the payroll surge is the COVID infection rate continues to decline. This is in part because 70 percent of Americans have been fully vaccinated, a total of 193 million Americans

“The current 7-day moving average of daily new cases (68,793) decreased 7.4% compared with the previous 7-day moving average (74,290). A total of 45,655,635 COVID-19 cases have been reported as of October 27, 2021,” reported the CDC.

And there is reason to believe even more workers will return to their jobs this fall and winter—especially moms as their children return to schools and become vaccinated with the new children’s’ vaccines.

What could dim this optimistic prediction? Very little, in my opinion. The euro area is also roaring back with an annual growth rate of 9 percent last quarter, according to Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.

And the rest of the world is slowly recovering from the pandemic. It’s really a matter of continuing to vaccinate the unvaccinated worldwide, which means restoring the supply-chains in this deeply interconnected world.

Is there anything that could prevent it from being restored? Maybe another war with…? Let’s hope not.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Manufacturing, Service Sector Growth Prolong Recovery

 Financial FAQs

 FREDmanufacturing

U.S. manufacturing and service sector activity continued to climb, despite the price hikes and supply bottlenecks. And we are just at the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Both economic sectors per the ISM supply managers’ indexes show a continuing red-hot demand for goods and services.

Inflation worriers can worry less, as production speeds up. Manufacturing output alone is up 14.8 percent in the second quarter YoY (see FRED graph), reducing price pressures. Eventually resolving supply-chain issues of clogged ports and container shipments will cause supplies to catch up to the demand for goods.

Timothy R. Fiore, ISM Manufacturing Chair, said “Business Survey Committee panelists reported that their companies and suppliers continue to deal with an unprecedented number of hurdles to meet increasing demand. All segments of the manufacturing economy are impacted by record-long raw materials lead times, continued shortages of critical materials, rising commodities prices and difficulties in transporting products. Global pandemic-related issues — worker absenteeism, short-term shutdowns due to parts shortages, difficulties in filling open positions and overseas supply chain problems — continue to limit manufacturing growth potential.”

The ISM services index measuring economic activity in industries such as Retail Trade; Transportation & Warehousing; Real Estate, Rental & Leasing; Arts, Entertainment & Recreation; jumped to an all-time high of nearly 67 in October, the Institute for Supply Management said Wednesday. The Business Activity and New Orders indexes reached 69.8 percent.

This tells us again that retail sales making up some 50 percent of consumer spending will continue strong in the holiday shopping season.

“In October, strong growth continued for the services sector, which has expanded for all but two of the last 141 months,” said ISM chair Anthony Nieves in a statement. “However, ongoing challenges — including supply chain disruptions and shortages of labor and materials — are constraining capacity and impacting overall business conditions.”

Though the huge obstacles to supply are causing some uncertainty, any figure above the 50 percent ISM survey breakeven point shows expansion. This is a sign that businesses are just beginning the replacement cycle of plants and equipment, rather than any imminent slowdown of activity caused by the bottlenecks and labor shortages.

As a side note, the number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits in late October fell to yet another pandemic low in the latest week, reflecting an urgent need by companies to hold onto to current employees and find new ones. New jobless benefit claims dropped by 14,000 to 269,000 in the seven days ended Oct. 30, the government said Thursday.

Some five million have not returned to work that were employed before the pandemic and there are 10 million job openings, so it’s not yet possible to know when and if the current labor shortage will continue to put a drag on growth.

But, in a way, this might cool demand enough that economic growth doesn’t overheat and bring on another asset bubble, and maybe tame the inflation tiger as well.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Job Openings At Record High

 Popular Economics Weekly

Calculated Risk

The number of job openings increased to a series high of 10.1 million on the last business day of June (yellow line on CR graph), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Monday.

It seems many working-age adults aren’t ready to return to work for several reasons, based on early data from Ziprecruiter, an online employment agency. About 13 million Americans are currently receiving unemployment benefits. In some states, they stand to lose them if they don’t actively search for work. That’s because some states have reimposed work search requirements that were waived in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ziprecruiter lists which states are terminating unemployment benefits early. “Early indications are that (unemployment) benefits have had some effect on job search,” says Julia Pollak, chief economist at Santa Monica, California-based Ziprecruiter, “but the effect is likely rather small because there are other things that are keeping people out of the labor force,” cited in a MarketWatch article.

She also lists some obvious reasons: The pandemic, which is resurgent in much of the country, and childcare, which has caused droves of workers — largely women — to stop working. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas puts this number at 1.3 million.

The Dallas Fed says 31 percent of workers are reluctant, for whatever reason, to return to their previous job. It’s a data point that has increased slowly but steadily for more than a year.

Hires rose to 6.7 million and total separations edged up to 5.6 million in the JOLTS report, which tells us there were one million new hires in July, which then is seasonally adjusted to give the actual unemployment report. Within separations, the quits rate increased to 2.7 percent. The layoffs and discharges rate was unchanged at 0.9 percent, matching the series low reached last month, which tells us that employers are reluctant to lay off anybody with the current labor shortage.

Could record high consumer confidence be another reason employees are reluctant to return to work during the ongoing pandemic? They feel flush with all the $4 trillion in pandemic aid already flowing through the economy, so they can afford to look for better job choices with higher pay and benefits.

The Conference Board’s jobs-plentiful index increased to a 21-year high of 54.9, for starters, and wages and salaries at the bottom end of salaried workers are rising at the fastest clip since the pandemic.

“Consumers’ appraisal of present-day conditions held steady, suggesting economic growth in Q3 is off to a strong start,” said Lynn Franco, Senior Director of Economic Indicators at The Conference Board. “Consumers’ optimism about the short-term outlook didn’t waver, and they continued to expect that business conditions, jobs, and personal financial prospects will improve.”

American workers are perhaps in the best place in decades to take advantage of this economic recovery.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

There Are More Jobs Than Ever!

 Financial FAQs

Calculated Risk

The number of job openings reached a series high of 9.3 million on the last business day of April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last Tuesday. Hires were little changed at 6.1 million. Total separations increased to 5.8 million. Within separations, the quits rate reached a series high of 2.7 percent while the layoffs and discharges rate decreased to a series low of 1.0 percent.

American workers are finally in a position to pick and choose from what is a record number of job openings. As proof, the number of quits jumped to a new all-time high of 4.0 million, versus 3.6 million last month.  These are voluntary exits from one job to a presumably better job.

This is panicking 25 red state governors into terminating the additional $300 per week in unemployment benefits early, believe it or not. They seem to be afraid that their workers might take the time to shop for a job with better pay and benefits, which anecdotal evidence already indicates.

The blue line in Calculated Risk’s graph tells us that hiring has actually returned to a more normal level, but sudden opening of the economy has orders pouring in for goods and services, which is more demand that can be satisfied at the moment, and this is boosting workers’ wages.

Reuters said “Higher worker mobility undoubtedly contributed to the surge in hourly earnings in the past two employment reports, as employers must not only pay higher wages to attract new workers but may feel more pressure to raise compensation to retain their existing employees.”

There are still too many unvaccinated employees that don’t feel safe returning to work, and most schools are still out or having only partial re-openings for many women to return to work.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also claimed data does not support the argument that increased unemployment benefits are leading to a workforce shortage. She said when they looked at states and sectors where supplemental benefits were high, there weren't lower job finding rates as the argument would suggest, and in fact it was the "exact opposite."

 Equitablegrowth.org

The simple truth is that Republican governors en masse that suppress additional aid for their workers is in keeping with their small government principles. Why else give up $26 billion that will flow to them if they allow their workers to keep the additional benefits?

Sadly, research is showing that this hurts those states, report a number of researchers. A report cited by The Center For Equitable Growth concludes that workers salaries increased as much as five percent when their unemployment benefits were extended to 99 weeks in 2010-11 following the Great Recession.

And as of May’s jobs report released last Friday, the country is still down 7.6 million jobs from before the pandemic, reports The Hill. The May jobs report also indicated that there are 9.3 million people who are officially unemployed — meaning they are actively looking for work and unable to find it. In most industries, the number of jobseekers still exceeds the number of job openings.

We are in a different world with COVID-19 that is killing more than all the world wars, a time  much like the Great Depression and New Deal when a small government ideology makes no sense.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Alas, The Recovery That Was....

Financial FAQs

Reuters.com

Because the deadline has passed to renew unemployment benefits enacted by the CARES Act, it looks like there will be no quick economic recovery in the fall. I am supposing the recovery could ultimately be shaped like a ‘W’—sporadic spurts of growth and declines in growth with new COVID-19 surges, given there is no coordinated national response to the pandemic.

And what about school openings when 60 percent of the major elementary school districts will have at-home schoolings this school year, according to a CNN survey, and no national guidance on what constitutes safe re-openings?

This has to be why Republicans are pushing for the full re-opening of schools, regardless of the dangers to children. It keeps at least one parent at home who isn’t working when they want to speed up the reopening of businesses.

The huge jump in consumer spending in May and June highlights what could have been if benefits had been renewed with the additional $600 per week boost to unemployment compensation, and which Republicans don’t want to renew.

The above Reuters graph highlights the record 7.1 percent boost given by the additional benefits since the CARES Act was implemented.

Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, rose 5.6 percent last month after a record 8.5 percent jump in May as more businesses reopened, the Commerce Department said. But most of the spending was due to the $600 boost to low-income service workers that tend to spend more of their incomes.

Consumers boosted purchases durable goods such as auto and appliances that last more than three years, as well as clothing and footwear. They also spent more on healthcare, dining out and on hotel and motel accommodation, though outlays on services remained lackluster because of caution sparked by the virus.

Q2 economic growth had plunged 32.9 percent because consumer spending fell minus -35 percent during this period. So growth will only recover when consumers feel safe enough venture out of their rabbit holes, I said last week. They will instead choose to save more—currently a huge 25 percent of their personal incomes vs. more normal 3-6 percent—and spend less.

FREDunemploymentrate

That is why Friday’s upcoming unemployment report is so important. Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan on Monday said he now expected an unemployment rate in a range of 9 -10 percent at the end of the year. Ten percent was the highest unemployment rate during the Great Recession when some 8 million jobs were lost.

The June unemployment rate was 11.1 percent and estimates are for July to show a 10.5 percent rate, according to an average estimate of economists. It took more than eight years, from October 2009 at the end of the Great Recession until March 2018, for the unemployment rate to drop from 10 to 4 percent, which is considered full employment.

How long might this depression last with today’s political polarization?

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen