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’America, healing? Not in Bob’s world
When you start talking about US growth in 2012, it’s hard to stop. The huge November consumer credit increase being a case in point. Plus a long slew of comfy data on auto sales, jobs…
So if you’re looking for a snappy corrective — here’s a précis of the opposite view,
America, healing?
The latest ADP numbers for private sector jobs in the US have demolished expectations: 325k jobs were created November-December against estimates that ranged from +145k to +225k.
Look on the bright side of 2012
With so much pessimism heading into 2012, we thought it would be prudent to discuss the possibility of positive surprises.
That’s the festive spirit of the economists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch,
The decline of US labour market dynamism, secular and cyclical
This simple graph, pulled from a presentation by economist John Haltiwanger, is a tidy illustration of what David Leonhardt means when he writes that the ongoing labour market ossification is a disturbing mix of both secular and cyclical trends.
Vox populi, vox debita
There’s a great Bloomberg survey of American voters on the economy out on Wednesday, with the results throwing up some striking stuff pre-FOMC.
Bloomberg’s reckons it’s all a deeply gloomy perspective on the recovery.
Britain’s Generation U pops up again
Not to put a downer on Wednesday’s news of the sharpest fall in UK unemployment for a decade but…
… the more we look at it, the more we’re finding reasons to be sceptical. Mostly regarding the post-crisis fate of Generation Y.
Meanwhile, in the Spanish periphery…
Zapatero! Zapped!
The FT reports on Monday that initial results from the weekend’s Spanish regional elections show hefty losses for the ruling Socialist party — with the right-wing opposition making inroads into towns run by the Socialists since the 1970s.
Core blimey! IMF’s advanced Europe worries
The IMF is back with another chart-laden mash-up of empirical evidence and conventional wisdom.
On Thursday the Fund released the first of two European outlook reports for 2011. It’s a bumper (114 pages) offering that’s well worth skimming.
[Gavyn Davies] What Osborne did today
So what did the Chancellor actually do today to change macro-economic strategy in the UK Budget?
In one important sense, he seems to have done little or nothing. The path for the structural budget deficit has been left almost exactly the same as it was after the 2010 Budget.
[Gavyn Davies] Weekly indicators for the US economy
And, following my earlier post on global growth, here is one on US growth.
Vasileios Gkionakis, my colleague at Fulcrum, has been producing weekly estimates for US GDP growth for several years now, and they have given consistently good signals about the past and future course of the economy.
Psst, chancellor
Ahead of this week’s ‘pro-growth’ but pro-austerity UK budget, comes a no-growth finding from the Institute for Fiscal Studies:
We are used to our incomes rising over time. Since 1961, median (middle) household income before housing costs in the UK has increased by 1.6% per year on average.
US payrolls preview
The consensus is pegging 180,000 as the magic number, with the unemployment rate ticking up slightly to 9.1 per cent. Via Bloomberg:
No fewer than five economic releases this week — ADP employment,
The ‘depreciation doomsday machine’
There are prognostications of doom for the US economy, and there are highly specific prognostications of doom for the US economy.
Here is one, from Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research:
The potentially
Miserable like it’s 1994, in Britain
It’s Friday, so we shouldn’t be doing this but … it’s misery (index) time!
Société Générale has an update of the infamous index, which was first developed in the 1970s by American economist Arthur Okun.
Claims-ian economics
Good news from the US Department of Labor Thursday morning as initial claims for unemployment insurance fell sharply last week:
In the week ending Feb. 5, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 383,000,
John Kemp: There is no global output gap
It’s no secret we at FT Alphaville ♥ John Kemp.
And we output gaps. Or at least, certain policymakers’ over-reliance on them.
So it’s with some joy that we read the latest from the Reuters columnist,
A hunger for change
Add criminally high youth unemployment and stir. Charts via Goldman:
Related link:
Egypt protests liveblog - The Guardian
Double or quits? The structural unemployment question
The cyclical vs structural debate raised a lot of heat and not a great deal of light during the summer. But in the last week or so wise minds have returned to the issue.
In a syndicated column, Raghuram Rajan cited research that ostensibly suggested the demise of housing-related jobs represents a structural break in the US labour market:
David Rosenberg’s cartoon-ish 2011
David Rosenberg’s gone all cartoony.
The Gluskin Sheff analyst seems to have given up on on words and is instead using charts — and Loony Tunes — to illustrate his (very salient) points.
The introductory text:
FOMC, minutes and minutiae
Mark November 23 in your calendars — it’s the day the FOMC will be releasing the minutes of the latest meeting in which the committee approved QE2.
In a speech Sunday night, cautioning against using monetary policy over-aggressively to pursue a specific unemployment target,
Spanish stats — meddle or muddle?
Okay, we have removed the original post here because we were taking just too much heat, life’s too short and we’d even started to question the (political) motives of the anonymous source.
But we’ve left the comments,
Those /important/crucial/vital US jobs figures
Yep it’s another freaking economic indicator. But an important one – US non-farm payrolls.
And with markets seemingly on hold ahead of the _____ report (please insert your favoured adjective) there’s
Size doesn’t matter, but age does
In addition to “widespread homeownership is awesome”, another long-standing popular myth of the American economy could turn out to be wrong.
Or at least, less right than was previously believed.
A new paper from three researchers,
Beveridge redux
Maybe there’s not so much to this Beveridge Curve business after all.
As we’ve written previously, many economists and other observers have been discussing in recent months the rather large and persistent gap between job openings and the high unemployment rate,
A day of bad news in charts and graphs
There was quite a lot of economic news and data coming out of the US on Thursday, and all of it fell somewhere on the spectrum between “as bad as expected” and “definitely worse”.
The Philly Fed survey,
What’s in this Beveridge?
Something strange is happening in the US labour market, and although a lot of people have noticed, it seems nobody can explain why.
Since the first quarter of the year, the unemployment rate has remained much higher than would be predicted given the pace of job openings.
Guest post: El-Erian on why the payrolls report matters
Today’s employment report was disappointing, writes Mohamed El-Erian. Nonfarm payroll employment declined by 131,000 in July, the rate and duration of unemployment remain stubbornly high, and other structural dimensions of the problem are deteriorating.
Econ bloggers do it better
A hat tip to Growthology for pointing us to Kauffman’s third quarter survey of economic bloggers, who have become increasingly pessimistic about the US economy–a perspective that was reinforced by this morning’s truly awful unemployment numbers. From the survey:
The grimness of US unemployment
Sluggish growth — meet sluggish jobs. Initial jobless claims — the number of people who file for unemployment insurance each week – jumped by 19,000 to 479,000, its highest level since April.
Economists polled by Reuters had been expecting a decline to 455,000.
An initial double-dip indicator
Wells Capital Management wants everyone to forget Payroll Friday.
The number to focus on as an indicator for the shape of the US recovery, Wells’ chief investment strategist Jim Paulsen says, is not the monthly payroll figure,