{"id":2794,"date":"2011-01-06T09:02:20","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T16:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonapollovoss.local\/?p=2794"},"modified":"2018-08-16T17:37:45","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T21:37:45","slug":"labor-market-clearly-improving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2011\/01\/06\/labor-market-clearly-improving\/","title":{"rendered":"Labor market clearly improving"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">This morning the Department of Labor released weekly jobless claims data (I can&#8217;t wait to not feel like I <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">have<\/span> to report this data).\u00a0 The results are encouraging.\u00a0 While the weekly number showed an increase in jobless claims of 18,000 to a total of 409,000, the four-week moving average showed a decline of 3,500 to 410,750.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Analysis:<\/strong> All of the jobless claims data in the last 5 weeks points to one thing: the job market is stabilizing and improving slowly.\u00a0 This is evidenced by:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">a reduction in the number of jobless claims<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">increased numbers of jobs as indicated by payroll data<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">an increase in the ability of economists to predict the data &#8211; this means things are not volatile, but stable<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">the revisions generally are not wild &#8211; again, an indication of stability<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Thus, if you are banking on a double dip recession then you are going to have to place a bet on some sort of extreme event occurring.\u00a0 Such an event would need to be of the magnitude like deeply renewed hostilities in the Middle East.\u00a0 Like the Iraqi government failing and the political situation devolving into civil war; or Israel raging a war versus Iran.\u00a0 Right now these events look very unlikely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Also of note in the data&#8230;remember last weeks pivotal jobless claims report that showed only 388,000 claims?\u00a0 That number was revised upward to 391,000.\u00a0 This is a minor correction.\u00a0\u00a0However, the degree of the miss was to the under-estimating side of things.\u00a0 This isn&#8217;t something to be concerned about right now.\u00a0 But it is something to note and to store away in case the next several revisions also show an over-estimation of the reality on the ground.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Importance grade:<\/strong> 7; honestly, the jobless data have less import now than they did two months ago.\u00a0 For almost two years my importance grade on these data was 9-10.\u00a0 Now my intuition suggests a downgrade in the importance of the jobless claim data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning the Department of Labor released weekly jobless claims data (I can&#8217;t wait to not feel like I have to report this data).\u00a0 The results are encouraging.\u00a0 While the weekly number showed an increase in jobless claims of 18,000 to a total of 409,000, the four-week moving average showed a decline of 3,500 to [&hellip;]<\/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-2794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794","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=2794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}