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Well, given how screwed up the claims numbers apparently are, it's kind of hard to really know where that trend is going. The continuing claims number mostly aligns with the employment picture, but again, because the UE rate is from the household survey, guessing on that is not easy. With employment 10mil under the peak pre-covid, the 7% UE rate is way too low, but that is simply due to the sharp drop in participation. Without that, we'd be around 10% UE. It is likely now that more schools are going virtual, and more people are avoiding being in public, that participation has dropped again, so we might see the jobless rate fall even with no net job gains or a slight decline. 2020 is the year of messed up data (just wait til we have a look at the Census next year!)

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Yes, the claims data set has become unreliable, which is a shame because it was a great source of real-time data before the pandemic

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It's going to take quite some time before we can rely on the claims number again. Sure enough this morning, another sizeable drop in participation reported as more women stay home (and apparently boomers dropping out of the workforce too - https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-shrinks-the-labor-market-pushing-out-women-and-baby-boomers-11607022074) No surprise there, given their relatively high risk of death if infected. The covid situation the next few months pretty much ensures that the job numbers will be pretty soft ahead, but we will likely not see that reflected in the UE rate, which could fall further if participation keeps dropping.

How the UE trends will really just be a matter of how fast the vaccines are rolled out and whether those people re-engage, and whether we can find a way in this stimulus (if it happens, a BIG if) to prevent another huge wave of business bankruptcies that will make recovery that much harder next year. What will likely happen next year is that the UE will rise a bit then stabilize, but it wont recovery at its current rate and will take years to get back to below 4% (with the number of years heavily dependent upon the fate of small businesses, which are not so easy to restart once BKed.) I'm still in alignment with you on a minor double dip that shows up as a small contraction in Q1 GDP. It wont show in Q4 since the quarter is mostly over and even if consumer spending collapsed in December, the two prior months will be enough to produce a strong gain, given the way the quarterly number is calculated. A December drop and weak January/February would sink the Q121 number quite a bit.

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