There’s only 1 employment number and 2 inflation numbers coming before the September Fed meeting. But, in general, when stagflation begins, the Fed is between a rock and a hard place, and there aren’t any particularly good choices.
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Even Fed Chair Powell won’t know the answer to that until the details are in. If unemployment remains low because fewer people are looking for jobs the situation will be less clear. The unemployment rate only counts people who are actively job seeking.
The overall Labor Force Participation Rate is dropping but the Labor Force Participation Rate - 25-54 Yrs. is holding steady so far.
If the prime-age labor force participation rate falls the unemployment rate could stay the same even if the number actually working drops.
So far it’s looking healthy. If inflation rises and the job picture stays healthy the Fed may not cut the fed funds rate.
And remember that the long-term yields are set by the bond market not by the Fed.
Wendy
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Will people be happy if those two downward revisions are revised sharply upward, and the July number is also revised upward?
Anyone heard who the next “job counter” will be? Larry Kudlow? Maria Bartiromo?
Steve…“beer made from plants”? sheesh
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Indeed… will USian economic statistics ever be the same again?
(CNN) It’s not so much that Trump appears to be firing someone as retaliation; it’s the message it sends to everyone else in a similar position. The message is that you might want that data and those conclusions to be to Trump’s liking, or else. It’s a recipe for getting plenty of unreliable data and conclusions. And even to the extent that information is solid, it will seed suspicions about the books having been cooked – both among regular Americans and, crucially, among those making key decisions that impact the economy. What happens if the next jobs report is great? Will the markets believe it?
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Exactly like some of the companies I worked for. Tell the boss what he wants to hear, or suffer the consequences. There is a reason so many once prominent US companies have been run into the ground by their own management.
Jim McNerney “I want it cheaper”.
73 Max engineer: "well, we can violate every custom of aircraft engineering that says use triple redundant systems, and make this automatic stall prevention system dependent on the proper function of only one AOA vane.
McNerney “do it, I want more profit, so I get a bigger bonus”
Steve
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Interesting. In the monthly report the BLS includes numbers for native born and foreign born. Over the year since July 2024, native born employment has increased by two million while the number of employed foreign-born decreased by 240K.
DB2
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And we can add this software that nobody knows about and we won’t tell anyone, because that would require training pilots on simulators and that’s expensive so the airlines are happy to have lower expenses, and Boeing is happy to sell cheaper airplanes, and the only ones unhappy are the 346 people who are dead.
Pretty good ratio: thousands of happy people and only 346 unhappy (not counting families & loved ones, of course.)
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What is really important, to McNerney, is he made his loot, and retired, March 1, 2016. The consequences of his decisions didn’t start, until the first 73 fell out of the sky, October 29, 2018, so they were someone else’s problem.
Steve
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How wonderful that C-suite decisionmakers can rely on not ever being held accountable for the downside of
their actions.
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I’m pretty sure that is always the calculation: fluffing up their bonus, in the near term, is a sure thing. Consequences are not 100% guaranteed, and, probably, will not happen until the current “JC” has moved on, and the consequences are someone else’s problem. Dimon seems to be the exception, as the consequences keep falling on the company, while he is still there, pulling down $30M/year, without anyone laying a glove on him.
Steve
Unsurprising. Do you think this is good or bad?
A rising tide lifts all boats, no? Seems like we’d want to have employment go up for everybody. The nativist agenda will surely doom our country if left unchecked.
The regime came into power partly riding the “replacement conspiracy” narrative. When the official says “native born taking jobs from foreigners” what the base hears is “white people replacing brown people”, which is what they voted for.
Steve
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