Economic Reports Scorecard
That improving economy the Fed has been touting? Well, as Emily Litella once said on Saturday Night Live, never mind. The surging economy of the Fed’s feverish imagination melted away over the last two weeks amid a deluge of weak and weaker than expected data. The data was never that strong to begin with but as I said in the last report, there had been a very slight improvement in July and early August. The last two weeks would seem to lay that short lived trend to rest. As always, we had some positive data points mixed in but the overall tone has definitely taken a turn for the worse.
Let’s take the positives first since it is a shorter – much shorter – list. The JOLTS report showed another rise in job openings to the highest of this cycle to 5.871 million jobs. That seems like good news but frankly we’ve had our doubts about this report for some time. In the report, the hiring rate, the quits rate, separations rate and the layoffs rate all were unchanged. I suppose it could be that companies just can’t find anyone to fill all those open jobs but even if that is the real truth it doesn’t say anything good about our economy. College degree = high employment rate does not mean Any College degree = high employment rate. And it certainly doesn’t mean college degree earned by attending only the classes that didn’t offend me or challenge the strongly held beliefs I acquired by smoking dope and reading The Nation = high employment rate. But I digress. Suffice it to say that we are suspicious of that job openings figure.Â
The other positive report – because there were only two during the last two weeks – was weekly jobless claims which continue to come in less than 300k. It should be noted though that claims have stopped falling and based on history probably have nowhere to go but up. But for now, it’s a positive and that’s how I’ll classify it. Employment – a coincident indicator at best – continues to be one of the few positives for the US economy.
