Hiring fell by more than 5% in June:
That's a pretty considerable drop, equal to 50% if it kept up for a full year (which it won't). Hiring has declined 17% in the past two years and nearly 10% over the past year. Over the past two years, hiring has dropped about 200,000 more than total separations (quits, firings, retirements, etc.).
The silver lining to this bad news is that a softer job market will prompt the Fed to ease interest rates. So there's that.
I wonder how this compares to the available SUPPLY of nonfarm workers, ie (people in workforce but not hired) + (people entering workforce) + (people exiting jobs but not workforce) – retirees.
I wouldn't be surprised if the supply had also declined. Be interesting to see a graph of hires as a % of available workforce.
IOW: maybe fewer people are being hired because there's nobody left to hire!
Ask and...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
(what's with the working age of 15?)
Anyway, we seem to be at a plateau right now, but numbers up roughly 10% since 2005.
And that's slightly different then the civilian labor force:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
Am I reading this right? Hiring is ca. 5-6 million every month in a civilian workforce of around 180 million? With typical job creation of a couple hundred thousand a month, this is nearly all churn. Seems like a lot of churn.
As usual when you're citing economic statistics (and particularly job market statistics) and using 2021 and 2022 as the start point, you really need to go back farther. Not as far back as 2009, such as in the below link (to the same data series), but definitely need pre-COVID context.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1qZJo
With that context, yeah the slowdown in hires is a trend we don't want to continue but the absolute level right now looks absolutely fine.
Yes--close to the pre-banking crises high.
I wonder how many times this year Biden's senior economic advisers have wept recalling how Arther Burns blatantly used Fed policy to goose economic growth (and employment) in 1971-72 to boost Nixon's re-election odds?
Time to start blaming AI.
Paul Krugman suggests the Sahm Rule is likely to be triggered on Friday. He (and Claudia Sahm herself, I believe) also suggests this most likely does not mean we're entering recession. But he does believe the Fed should start cutting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/opinion/sahm-rule-unemployment-recession.html