Thursday, September 28, 2017

Unemployment claims

The spiker a the end is the hurricane effect.  We had a much larger spike during Katrina as we see in 2005.

Also we have a 3.1% growth for Q3, very good, but surprising.  That too may be a fake, much of it unobserved inflation to be revised down later, another hurricane effect.

The only concern is that all the swans are happening at the end of the recession cycle when resources are all allocated.  

If we get medium term turbulence in the labor market, then employers may continue layoffs until the labor market clears.  But the labor market is never ready, it has high transaction costs and intermediaries exit the market when searches get expensive.  Thus large tradebook uncertainty means we take very large steps to requantize, we appear to limit cycle. The larger the tradebook uncertainty, the more sparse, and incomplete, are the hiring managers. JOLTs, job openings and closings, is an activity monitor, it should tell us how much jamming is going on in the labor market.

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