NFP and private NFP up (although below recent peaks), while civilian employment rises.
Figure 1: Wisconsin Nonfarm Payroll Employment (dark blue), Philadelphia Fed early benchmark for NFP (pink), Civilian Employment (tan), real wages and salaries, deflated by national chained CPI (light blue), GDP (red), coincident index (green), all in logs 2021M11=0. Source: BLS, DWD, BEA, Philadelphia Fed, and author’s calculations.
Since the civilian employment series is based on a much smaller sample (at the state level), it is best to rely on the establishment series. Here NFP are trending sideways relative to mid-2024 levels.
Here’s how nonfarm payroll employment compares to the August Dept of Revenue forecast:
Figure 2: Wisconsin nonfarm payroll employment (blue), and Wisconsin DoR Economic Outlook forecast of August (tan), both in 000’s, s.a. Source: BLS, DWD, DoR.
Off topic – Businesses preparing for tariff increases:
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/12/trump-tariffs-china-mexico-supply-chain
This report is entirely anecdotal – we get no idea of the magnitude of adjustment already underway of planned. That’s not a criticism – it couldn’t be otherwise at this early date.
One thing that pops out for me is tariff arbitrage. This report suggests moving production from China, which face the greatest threatened tariff increase, to countries threatened with lesser increases. Not much talk of bringing production home.
The point is made that shifting sourcing away from China (Mexico?) means shifting from where capacity already exists to countries which do not currently have the capacity to replace Chinese supply. First come, first served? Top bid wins? Either way, there is limited capacity to source outside of China (Mexico).
This is not the only press report to observe that this threatened round of tariff increases comes when consumers are more price-sensitive than last time. It may be that profit margins and overall levels of demand are squeezed more this time than last time, if Trump carries out his threatened tariff increases.
This report confirms that some businesses are front-running tariff increases by stocking up on imports now. That’s a current cost, occurring in a high-interest-rate environment. Tough on margins in the near term.