Business Cycle Indicators as of October 2

Nonfarm payroll employment under consensus, confirms the slowdown:

Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (dark blue), industrial production (red), personal income excluding transfers in Ch.2012$ (green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2012$ (pink), all log normalized to 2019M02=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, Macroeconomic Advisers (10/1 release), NBER, and author’s calculations.

The net change in employment was 661 thousand, under the 850 thousand in the Bloomberg consensus. August employment was revised down. More discussion here.

 

13 thoughts on “Business Cycle Indicators as of October 2

  1. pgl

    The household survey numbers were worse even if the White House is touting that fall in the unemployment rate. I posted this comment under another thread but it bears repeating if only for the link to the BLS Household Survey figures:

    First words out of Mark Meadows did not address the spread of COVID-19 in the White House but rather the drop in the unemployment rate from 8.4% to 7.9%. I guess Kudlow suckered him into thinking this was incredible news but check out the Household Survey data:

    https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm

    The employment to population ratio barely inched up while the labor force participation rate fell. This was not a great employment report but of course the liars in the White House will tout it as such.

      1. pgl

        Trump’s physician said in a memo that the president “as a precautionary measure” has “received a single 8 gram dose of Regeneron’s polyclonal antibody cocktail.”

        Good choice. Trump will be at Walter Reed for the next few days.

      2. pgl

        “Trump has also been taking zinc, vitamin D, melatonin, a daily aspirin and the histamine-blocker famotidine, Conley said in the memo.”

        What no bleach? Who is this Conley fellow and why is he throwing a kitchen sink array of things that have no value in addressing this virus?

  2. pgl

    Thanks for the NPR link which noted:

    “Unemployment in September dipped to 7.9%, from 8.4% in August. The drop was driven primarily by people leaving the workforce — especially women. As a new school year began with many students still home, women left the workforce in September at four times the rate that men did.”

    Gee Mark Meadows painted that drop in the measure unemployment rate as evidence of a booming employment market. Of course Meadows lies even more than his boss does.

      1. pgl

        The next BLS report comes out on Friday November 6 – which is 3 days after the polls closed. So the November report will not matter to Trump. He does not care about workers – just his poll numbers.

  3. macroduck

    At the pace of job gain reported for September, it would take 16 more months to get back to the prior employment peak. That would mean over two years just to get back to where we were. Didn’t have to be this way. Strict social distancing, mask use and hand washing could have prevented much of that loss.

  4. macroduck

    An extraordinary number of women left the labor force in September. Their departure accounts for the sharp drop in the jobless rate. That is a seasonally adjusted figure. I haven’t found a non-seasonally adjusted series. I wonder if moms supervising home study account for part of that departure from the labor force.

    1. pgl

      Exactly. Of course Mark Meadows painted a very different picture this morning. Meadows is indeed a liar hoping the public is too stupid to realize what you noted.

  5. spencer

    I am suspicious of the real manuf. & trade data and have been since BEA quit doing the leading indicator.

    When BEA did it they deflated each of the major components and added them back up. But occasionally this
    generated very large moves in the monthly deflator if one month the data was dominated by high priced items
    like aircraft and defense equipment and another month was dominated by low cost computers, etc..
    Now,different people are using different data to calculate the real data. Many use the PPI for equipment.
    Others,like Haver try to add up the deflated component like the old BEA series. I use Haver and it shows
    manuf & Trade back to a new high as your data shows — do you use Haver?

    Manuf & Trade was a good indicator when we were dealing with the old heavy industry economic cycle.
    But now that services and finance or so much more important in the cycle I believe the manf & trade series
    should be replaced with some thing tied more closely tied to finance and technology..

    But, to me this is a reason to not give the leading indicator too much weight in my thinking.

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