Single family permits continued to run at a pace consistent with the expansion phase of the business cycle. What will be interesting is to see whether they can generate the same track and trend they did in the final four months of last year. Some observers are thinking that the increases in interest rates that […]

The long end of the yield curve continues to trend sideways after pricing in the first two increases in the Federal Funds Rate. The peaks and valleys you see since trading day 50 are headline driven events. The two headlines the bond market is looking for are 1) the pace at which the Federal Reserve […]

While doing some work on another project I happened upon this series and the one on the next chart and I thought I would share them with you for the next several months. You are intimately familiar with the Unemployment Rate, which is the ratio of the number of persons unemployed to the civilian labor […]

Now that we know something about the composition of the employment gain, we can start to look into what happened to unemployment. Just so you know, it is possible for the number of people employed and the number of people who are unemployed to increase at the same time. That’s why we showed you the […]

The BLS asks every survey respondent (they survey 60,000 households every month) whether they are working full-time or part-time. Those who answer part-time are then asked whether they are working part-time because they have to or because they want to. Those who answer that they “have to” are included in the count we saw on […]

The BLS breaks out part-time employment into two categories. This one counts the people who have to work part-time. They do so because they can only find part-time work, their employer limits their hours to less than 35 per week either because of slack work or because the job is structured to be less than […]

The same way as I had to open the scale on nonfarm payrolls, I had to open the scale on this chart. For those of you new to the report, total civilian employment breaks down into full-time and part-time employment. And those partitions are what we are next going to explore. While you might have […]

Let’s wrap up the Establishment Survey, which is the official name for the report that produces all of the payroll numbers, with a couple of notes. The first was that I had to open the scale on this chart, which is something I enjoy doing. The second is that the internals of the report suggested […]

The news on wages remains unimpressive, with the line on this chart still struggling to make it past the 3% level. About the only nice thing we can say here is that the line is still in a rising trend mode. Subscribe now!

Well, we can shift from using the level of the series to using the year-over-year percent change in the series. This gets us the smoothness we got by doing the averaging of the level as well as a level of consistency that will allow its use to more finely date the cycle phases. Here you […]