80 thousand in September, 104 thousands private.
Everyone will say this is a weak report and not enough to keep up with population growth. This is all true.
Lets be good Bayesians though and ask how this report changes our priors about the movement of the economy.
From that perspective the internals look pretty good
Construction lost 20K but we have copious real time information on construction and the fundamentals tell us it is at a very low level but will be picking up. Also I slightly suspect this will be revised up as Non-residential specialty lost 22K but we know that power lines are going up across the country.
Manufacturing gained only 5K and motor vehicle parts only 6.5K .Yet we know that real time sales in vehicles is on the rise.
Some weakness across the board in non-durable manufacturing which IS bad news cause I don’t have a better real-time series for that stuff. Will check against the industrial production data. Perhaps, worst I don’t have sales broken down in this way in real time and so this is the best information we have.
Government lost 24K jobs. However, we understand what’s going on here and its not cyclical. That is to say it is not related to monetary policy per se. So it tells us nothing about the general state of the economy.
The private service economy added 114K which is well on pace with the last recovery. There is more to be said, that maybe I will get to later today. But, here is the long-run trend on private sector service sector employment.
Notice that its just as strong as the last recovery though coming sooner. Not quite as strong as the 80 and 90s.
On the other hand goods and government over that period look like this
To the extent there is a structural transformation afoot in the US economy, this is it.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
Friday ~ November 4th, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Desolation Jones
The revised numbers for August and September were also interesting. I remember the original report for August was +0 new jobs added
“The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for August was revised
from +57,000 to +104,000, and the change for September was revised
from +103,000 to +158,000.”
Friday ~ November 4th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
Curt Doolittle
Yes, the average citizen can attest to the fact that you’re correct simply by casual observation while living daily life.
The problem is obvious. The question that is currently circulating in the popular media is whether increased money supply that increases demand, and whether additional taxation and redistribution, will improve that long term trend, or whether we had better improve our schools, improve our industries, improve our infrastructure, and improve the world marketability of our unskilled, and semi-skilled working classes. We cannot make our lower classes more productive by demonizing our upper classes. And we are too heterogeneous now to form a ‘society’ that will support different classes under the emotional sentiments of tribal nationalism.
Germany promises the working classes skilled labor. America promises the working classes entry into the middle and upper middle classes. But, america’s promise if false. Its just not possible. And what you’re seeing today is the acknowledgement among the laboring classes that their status is depreciating along with their incomes, and that given their ages and knowledge, that the rest of their lives are questionably comfortable due to the false promise of middle class membership — given to them to assuage the natural problem if integration of races and cultures with different potentials both environmental, physical and cultural.
Economics is a subset of politics, not the other way ’round. In the long run we are all human.
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 8:14 am
Sunday links: excess volatility | Abnormal Returns
[...] Some employment-related charts. (EconomPic Data, Modeled Behavior) [...]
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Sunday links: excess volatility
[...] Some employment-related charts. (EconomPic Data, Modeled Behavior) [...]