The American economy gained 428,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 338,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate remained at 3.6%.
Among blue-collar workers, weekly wages were up 0.37% from last month. That's an annual rate of 4.6%, which is about -4% adjusted for inflation.
Among all workers, weekly wages were up 0.31% from last month. That's an annual rate of 3.9%, which is about -4.6% adjusted for inflation.
On a yearly basis, blue-collar wages were up 5.5%, which is about -3% adjusted for inflation. Among all workers, wages were up 4.6%, which is about -3.9% adjusted for inflation.
Here is the April unemployment rate for various races and education levels.
I wonder if the Biden Administration will find some way to communicate this to the electorate.
What that people are getting poorer?
No, that more people are getting jobs. Sorry this is so hard for you. How about finishing that GED before posting again.
It's those negative wages that are the problem. There's not much Biden can say that will take peoples minds off the fact that they are having to pay a lot more for two things: food and gas.
The part that blows my mind is the thought that voters actually seem to think Republicans would do a better job. And even if this is true, are they/we willing to give up the widening of individual rights (women's autonomy, marriages - same sex and interracial, integrated public schools) for a cheaper gallon of milk?
Food and transit are the bedrock of basuc life in our society.
Also the democrats are already screwing up the Roe messaging so it's kind of like the gop is competing against children.
Food is not one thing. It's a whole bunch of items, many of which are highly seasonal in price. Food inflation describes a reality that there are more prices going up than coming down. And because there's a lot to choose from if you aren't rigid about things there's ways to blunt that inflation.
Gasoline is one thing (OK, three different octane varieties) and there's not a whole lot one can do to get around the fact of gasoline prices going up. For a little while they were coming back down, but now they seem to be surging again.
Surging, no. When you don't fix prices, elites like on exchanges or anti-Americans in Saudi Arabia who won't fulfil their own quotas. They can try and creep prices.
I doubt negative wages are a problem . Who knows what wages or inflation really is. When your seeing large increases to nominal wages, government bean counters struggle.
And even if this is true, are they/we willing to give up the widening of individual rights (women's autonomy, marriages - same sex and interracial, integrated public schools) for a cheaper gallon of milk?
Pretty much. How does that (historically dubious) quote attributed to Churchill go? "The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
The most anodyne blog post in the history of the internet. What news will be like when only robots are writing for other robots who are reading. I understand it's important not to characterize economic news as anything but "crummy" or "scary" but if "stellar" is too hard a word to type, maybe a "solid' would do, or a simple "not bad."
Just a year and a half ago, CRS's outlook for unemployment ran projections from CBO, the Fed, and WSJ for unemployment in 2022 and not one was close to predicting we'd down to 3.9% right now. CBO's projection was over 7%. Despite a stellar jobs recovery, all you read about is gloom and doom. It's nuts.
A few nuggets from the 11/2020 CRS outlook:
+ "Current projections show persistently high unemployment for the next few
years"
+ "Figure 3 suggests consensus from both the public and private sector that the
effects of COVID-19 on unemployment will last through 2022"
+ "CBO projects that the economy will be functioning below full potential through 2030 and, therefore, the economy will not see a return to full employment during this decade either"
In any sane world, the current US jobs performance would be getting rave reviews.
👍👍👍👍
Lagging effect from small business creation is going to bloat nfp until revision when this will be revised back to 2021, then 2022 will probably be revised downward.
I’m not an economist, so here’s a question that comes to my mind. How do all these consecutive months of stellar job growth somehow manage to coincide with a documented contraction of the economy in the first quarter of this year? Perhaps the estimate of that contraction might be revised at some point in time?
I’m also not a politician or a journalist. So I also don’t understand why none of these stellar job reports ever receive much attention. Trump received what I think can fairly be described as rapturous news coverage if and when his economy added somewhere in the range of 250,000 jobs. Biden can do better every month for a year with no one seeming to notice.
Before his tragic and recent demise, Eric Boehlert was writing a lot about this topic on his substack “Press Run.” For example, one of his final posts (in April) was, “Why is the Press rooting against Biden?” But I don’t think he ever provided any convincing answers to that question, he simply did a great job of documenting the phenomenon.
Any thoughts ... ?
I can’t think that the reported contraction, and especially the 7.5% decline in productivity, are anything other than bizarre artifacts, and further evidence of how bad economists are at measurement. Even if all the new hires of the last year were brought on board by employers for the express purpose of sitting on their hands, I don’t think you could register a productivity decline that large. First, there are multiple ways of measuring productivity, and economists are rarely clear about the distinctions. The measures that production people use are what I would call material productivity, measured in units of output: light bulbs produced, or insurance claims processed, per labor hour. We don’t forget how to make light bulbs, so absent the collapse of civilization, it’s almost unheard of for that kind of productivity to decrease. But when a factory switches from making incandescent to LED light bulbs, you have an apples-to-oranges problem. As also when you want to measure productivity in the aggregate for a whole economy - how do you add up light bulbs and insurance claims? The economist’s solution is to use the value of output instead of raw units. A consequence of this is that price changes that have nothing to do with worker efficiency now move the productivity measure. So imagine a worker stitching together ten pairs of generic sneakers in an hour. His company gets a contract with an NBA All-Star. Now he stitches ten pairs of machine-signed sneakers every hour, and they sell for three times the price of generics. Voilà! His productivity has jumped 300%! Clearly, all sorts of extraneous factors have affected prices recently. I don’t know how adjustments are made for those, and for inflation (loss of value of a currency), but it’s hard to imagine that the corrections are so perfect that the result still reflects nothing but worker efficiency.
Exports contracted 3.2% which clearly didn't happen. Then there is the slight decline in inventory when it should of surged. Consumption/Investment was 1.8% growth. Looks like stale numbers. Likely Omicron influenced as GDP for the first quarter gets started before Christmas and the 2nd quarter mid-March. Delayed reporting and goods influx.
Basically it was an accounting fluke created by companies stockpiling inventory in order to smooth out supply chain disruptions. That puts a lot of costs on company balance sheets and the balance of trade that, due to the way economic growth is calculated, ended up producing a negative number.
I'm curious, is the racial breakdown within each education level the same? Is the white and asian low employment level simply an artifact of a higher education level, or is there still a racial component to the unemployment numbers within each education level?
Wage growth in the 5% range, while not keeping up with inflation, still indicates we are in a potential step change of higher inflation and wages. We lived in a 3-4% nominal growth world and a 1-2% inflation for about 15 years. The inflation concerns aren’t going away, now interest rates are resetting and the markets are very nervous…. It’s dicey out there.
I'm feeling shades of the 1970s here.
Republicans coming off a very bad, controversial presidency.
Dems swept into power only to have a rocky, inflation-ridden economy.
A weak Dem presidency that is easily distracted by the small stuff, no overriding sense of purpose or overall vision.
Last time, this led to a 12 year Republican run in charge of the Presidency.
Meh, nope. You can't have inflation with declining % share of M2 money supply growth. The supply shortage crap has ended( as the trade deficit surge indicates, goods are moving in at a unprecedented rate despite China).
The labor market is better even when adjusted for demographic factors than the mid-late 70's.
The final phase will be the end of Putin. Who's regime is crumbling. The new one will flood the West with cheap oil. Likely creating a price war with OPEC(Saudi's) for the rest of the year into 2023.
Remember how all the stats that people like Kevin bandy about that show the 70's as the high water mark for worker earning power in recent US history? In the late 70s/early 80's there was bad inflation, but generally, wages kept pace with rising prices (while also thereby making inflation tough to fight). People remember paying outrageous mortgage rates when the Volker Fed finally moved to shut it down, but it's not like people couldn't afford milk and eggs any more. This time around, we have inflation, but because your average worker has absolutely no bargaining power, corporations are just keeping wages low, raising prices, and pocketing the difference.
Not for much longer. Gluts are forming.
I can see this a anti-1979. Instead of a long drawn out mess, Putin is likely toast. He, and his 2 lackeys can do it the soft way and resign, leaving Russia to spend their billions elsewhere. Do it the hard way, with a civil war they will lose. Or use Nukes, and die anyways.
Russia's new government will flood the market with oil knocking prices way back as Saudi's are forced to also actually fill in quotas to keep lines open. Putin's weakness is probably why they aren't filling quotas now. Stocking up reserves in a poet red sea conspiracy world for competition.
So the Red Sea Conspiracy is over. Gas is cheap and yry inflation is collapsing. Anti-1979 indeed.