{"id":2240,"date":"2010-11-04T11:08:52","date_gmt":"2010-11-04T15:08:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonapollovoss.local\/?p=2240"},"modified":"2018-08-17T09:12:29","modified_gmt":"2018-08-17T13:12:29","slug":"hire-someone-already-were-very-tired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2010\/11\/04\/hire-someone-already-were-very-tired\/","title":{"rendered":"Hire someone already! We’re very tired"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States Department of Labor reported three significant economic statistics this morning…<\/span><\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Weekly jobless claims were up 20,000 to 457,000.\u00a0 The four-week moving average rose 2,000 to 456,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Worker productivity rose to 1.9% in the third quarter.<\/span><\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 The government’s estimate for October GDP growth was 2.0%.<\/span><\/p>\n

Analysis:<\/strong>\u00a0 Let’s take these statistics in turn…<\/span><\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 That initial weekly jobless claims have basically been flat for the last month, up 2,000, is not surprising.\u00a0 Everyone knows about the “game of chicken” that I have been describing ad nausea since the spring of this year.\u00a0 Businesses are not hiring.\u00a0 The unemployment situation remains bleak.\u00a0 It’s very hard out there to find quality work.\u00a0 And this is the single most important economic statistic on the planet week in and week out.<\/span><\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Productivity is up.\u00a0 What this means is that businesses are finally starting to increase their revenues.\u00a0 Remember me saying that eventually businesses were going to have to make their profit numbers, not just through cutting expenses, but through actual sales growth.\u00a0 For productivity to be up means that businesses are finally increasing their sales since productivity is output (i.e. revenues) per worker.<\/span><\/p>\n

What this also means is that new workers are not being hired at the same pace as sales are actually growing.\u00a0 This is not<\/strong> a sustainable situation.\u00a0 Eventually workers will be overworked and productivity will fall.\u00a0 So if sales growth remains even mildly even then this means that there will be a growth in the number of jobs out there.\u00a0 Yea!<\/span><\/p>\n

If you have read my “best of the blog” section then you know that I have a post in there about what is “real economic growth.”\u00a0 Productivity is a very rough estimate of that real economic growth.\u00a0 Fake economic growth happens when money is cheap (i.e. interest rates are too low) and growth in the economy is simply inflationary (too much money chasing too few a number of goods).\u00a0 So compare productivity up 1.9% to estimated GDP growth in October of…<\/span><\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 GDP up 2.0% is paltry.\u00a0 This is not rapid enough economic growth to improve the hiring situation out there anytime soon.\u00a0 But a silver-lining is that the economy is growing roughly in step with productivity.\u00a0 That means there isn’t a lot of BS inflationary, debt financed type of growth taking place.\u00a0 For the long-term health of the economy this is a very, very, very, very good thing.\u00a0 Also, compare the GDP growth to the growth in retail sales I reported earlier today on the blog, of up 1.6%.<\/span><\/p>\n

Importance grade:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

1. 10; the most important number on the planet right now.\u00a0 Unfortunately, there still is no growth in employment.\u00a0 It is stuck in a vicious circle.<\/span><\/p>\n

2.\u00a08; productivity growth is wonderful.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it is also a preliminary estimate of worker exhaustion.\u00a0 Hopefully U.S. businesses will begin hiring new employees soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. 6; that GDP estimate is very preliminary and not at all reliable as an estimate for what the U.S. economy is going to do in the fourth quarter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Taken together, these statistics affirm what we already know about the U.S. economy: it is growing very slowly in this post-recessionary environment.\u00a0 But the growth is real<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United States Department of Labor reported three significant economic statistics this morning… 1.\u00a0 Weekly jobless claims were up 20,000 to 457,000.\u00a0 The four-week moving average rose 2,000 to 456,000. 2.\u00a0 Worker productivity rose to 1.9% in the third quarter. 3.\u00a0 The government’s estimate for October GDP growth was 2.0%. Analysis:\u00a0 Let’s take these statistics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}