The American economy gained a meager 209,000 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 an even more meager 119,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.6%.
This is a bad report, but at least there are no gotchas. The increase was solely because more people got jobs, not because workers dropped out of the labor force or anything like that.
As usual, the employment level was weak.
Since the start of the year the employment level has shown a gain of less than 150,000 jobs per month.
On the moderately good news side of things, average weekly wages increased at an annualized rate of 8.1% since last month. That's due to both higher hourly wages and an uptick in the number of hours worked. Adjusted for inflation, it comes to an increase of 6.6%, quite a nice bump even if it is likely to throw the fear of God into the Fed.
Kevin, I see your opinion re: jobs is half full today. Looking at jobs from December 2022, take out January and things look pretty stable. A soft landing after all.
Yeah, I wonder what KD thinks a "soft landing" looks like?
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1. The economy gained 119K more jobs than necessary to account for population growth.
2. "The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.6%."
3. "The increase was solely because more people got jobs, not because workers dropped out of the labor force or anything like that."
4. "...Average weekly wages increased at an annualized rate of 8.1% since last month. That's due to both higher hourly wages and an uptick in the number of hours worked. Adjusted for inflation, it comes to an increase of 6.6%..."
This is a bad report...
Yeah I can see why this jobs report is Bad News For Biden amongst the alleged "center left" types like Kevin Drum, who draw downward sloping trend lines over bars in 2022-23 that would have had a flat trend line if they occurred in 2019-2020 instead.
Jesus, with cheerleaders like Drum leading the way, it's no wonder everyone thinks record-low unemployment under a Democratic president is somehow a bad thing.
Thank you!
It's time Democrats started recognizing the truth. Biden has been a GREAT president. Let's start feeling that, people.
👍👍👍👍👍
Good news is bad news/bad news is good news...it gets confusing, especially where the stock market is concerned and the games the Fed plays....
The Biden administration is pushing out as much money as it can from it's infrastructure bill, and basically all other initiatives too--so Congress can't try to claw it back (via The Guardian?). See also, The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/07/biden-economic-industrial-investment-red-state-beneficiaries/674633/
And munition factories are up and running....
Impossible to keep up the torrid growth of 2021 and 2022.
Trend lines are misleading and uninformative in this instance. Unless we think we can get to 0% unemployment and more employees than people.
We are in the middle of the best economy that almost every working age person has ever seen but everybody seems to have a reason to deny it.
You're talking about Bidenomics!!. Dems need to get out there and sell this economy. They have the facts on their side. Use them.
One wonders just how far ahead of population growth Mr Drum expects net new jobs to be, and for how long.
For that matter, population growth in the country with the highest per-capita emissions on the planet doesn’t seem like such a great thing itself.
I'm late to this post, and it seems like everyone else has already Done the Work, so I'm just here to say thank you to the Jabberwocking comment section for confirming that I'm not the only one scratching my head at Kevin's labor market takes this week.
Think confirmation bias. Kevin sees the results he wants in the data.
Let me rephrase. Kevin has a preconceived notion about what the results will be, and unconsciously works the data to confirm his belief.
I don't see how an illusory constant -- the 90K baseline jobs to keep up with population growth -- does anything to better understand job growth or the economic situation.
There is seasonality to births in the US. Job demand is also seasonal.
If you want to create a baseline, maybe pick the highest labor participation rate since 1950, then use that to calculate the monthly gap in jobs created versus jobs needed to maintain employment stability at peak labor participation.