26/7/19: Stop Equating Low Unemployment Rate to High Employment Rate

There is always a lot of excitement around the unemployment stats these days. Why, with near-historical lows, and the talk about 'full employment', there is much to be celebrated and traded on in the non-farm payrolls stats and Labor Department press releases. But the problem with all the hoopla around these numbers is that it too often mixes together things that should not be mixed together. Like, say, mangos and frogs, or apples and moths.

Take a look at the following data:

Yes, unemployment is low. Civilian unemployment rate is currently at seasonally-adjusted 3.7% (June 2019), and Unemployment rate for: 20 years and over, at 3.3%, seasonally adjusted. On 3mo average basis, last time we have seen comparable levels of Civilian unemployment was in 1969, and 20+ Unemployment rate was in 2000. Kinda cool, but also revealing: historical lows in unemployment require  Civilian unemployment metric to confirm. Which means that factoring in Government employment, things are bit less impressive today. But let us not split hairs.

Here is the problem, however: record lows in unemployment are not the same as record levels in employment. Low unemployment, in fact, does not mean high employment.

To see this, look at the solid red line, plotting Employment rate for 20 years and older population. The measure currently sits at 71.2 percent and the last three months average is at 71.1 percent.  Neither is historically impressive. In fact, both are below all months (ex-recessions) for 1990-2008. Actually, not shown in the graph, you would have to go back to 1987 to see the same levels of employment rate as today. Oops...

But why is unemployment being low does not equate to employment being high? Well, because of a range of factors, the dominant one being labor force participation. It turns out (as the chart above also shows), we are near historical (for the modern economy's period) lows in terms of people willing to work or search for jobs. Or put differently, we are at historical highs in terms of people being disillusioned with the prospect of searching for a job. Darn! The 'best unemployment stats, ever' and the worst 'willingness to look for a job, ever'.

U.S. Labor Force Participation rate is at 62.9 percent (62.8 percent for the last three months average). And it has been steadily falling from the peak in 1Q 2000 (at 67.3 percent).

When we estimate the relationship between the Employment rate and the two potential factors: the Unemployment rate and the Participation rate, historically (since 1970s) and within the modern economy period (since 1990) as well as in more current times (since 2000), and since the end of the Great Recession (since 2010) several things stand out:

1. Unemployment rate is weakly negatively correlated with Employment rate, or put differently, decreases in unemployment rate are associated with small increases in employment; across all periods;
2. Labor force participation rate is strongly positively correlated with Employment rate. In other words, small increases in labor force participation rate are associated with larger increases in employment; across all periods;
3. Labor force participation rate, in magnitude of its effect on Employment rate, is roughly 14-15 times larger, than the effect of Unemployment rate on Employment rate; across all periods; and
4. The relatively more important impact of Labor force participation rate on Employment, compared to the impact of Unemployment rate on Employment has actually increased (albeit not statistically significantly) in the last 9 years.

These points combined mean that one should really start paying more attention to actual jobs additions and employment rate, as well as participation rate, than to the unemployment rate; and this suggestion is more salient for today's economy than it ever was in any other period on record.

But above all, please, stop arguing that low unemployment rate means high employment. Bats are not cactuses, mangos are not moths and CNN & Fox kommentariate are not really analysts.

15/4/19: One order of "Bull & Sh*t" for the U.S. Labor Market, please

The 'strongest economy, ever'...

Despite a decade-long experiment with record-low interest rates, despite trillions of dollars in deficit financing, and despite headline unemployment numbers staying at/near record lows, the U.S. economy is not in a rude health. In fact, by two key metrics of the labor force conditions, it is not even in a decent health.

As the chart above clearly shows, both in terms of period averages and in terms of current level readings, Employment to Population Ratio (for civilian population) has remained at abysmally low levels, comparable only to the readings attained back in 1986. Meanwhile, labor force participation rate is trending at the levels consistent with those observed in 1978.

Dire stuff.

Update: Here is a chart showing how the current recovery compares to past recoveries (hint: poorly):

17/5/18: U.S. Labour Markets and the Trump Administration Record

The Global Macro Monitor have published an exhaustive study of the U.S. labour market trends over the first 15-16 months of the President Trump's tenure. The  post is long, brilliantly detailed, and empirically and intuitively flawless (yeah, I know, I don't think I ever used this descriptor of an economics research piece before). So read it in full here: https://macromon.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/deconstructing-the-u-s-jobs-market/.

Top line conclusions are:

• Comparing the "first 15 [monthly] payroll reports of the Trump administration to the last 15 of the Obama administration",  "as of the end of April 2018, the Trump economy has generated 2.7 million jobs versus 3.1 million in Obama’s economy, or 373k fewer workers added to payrolls"
• Growth in employment was of lower quality during the Trump tenure to-date too: "the private sector has also added 124k fewer jobs in the Trump economy. Net job creation in the government sector under President Trump is relatively flat." The latter metric puts a boot into the arguments that President Trump is a fiscal conservative aiming to reduce public sector weight in the economy. 
• Earnings comparatives are also wobbly: "There is relatively little difference in the growth of average hourly earnings in the Trump and Obama employment reports." Which is more striking when one recognises that the Trump Administration inherited a tightening labour market, in which, normally, one would expect more wages inflation.
• "Job creation in President Trump’s economy outperforms the Obama economy in 5 of the 13 private sector industry groups, most significantly in manufacturing and mining", but "Almost all of the relative outperformance in mining is the result of the reversal in oil prices. Coal mining and auto manufacturing employment has not recovered". In other words, even in the core industries targeted by the Administration for growth, the Administration efforts have little to do with any recovery in the mining sector./ 
• Cyclically, the authors note that "The results are surprising as GDP growth was significantly higher during the Trump payroll reports, averaging of 2.53 percent on an annual basis, versus 1.56 percent during the last five quarters of the previous administration". However, this also means that current jobs creation is coming toward the end of the expansion cycle, and can be expected to be lower due to constraints of labour supply.
• Key observation, from macroeconomic environment point of view is that "the economy continues to reward capital over labor disproportionately". There is a fundamental problem with this development. The U.S. labour markets flexibility represents a net positive for the private sector productivity in the short run. However, as capital and technological deepening of production processes progresses, the very same flexibility leads to lower degree of upskilling and re-training of the existent workforce. This is a huge source of risk and uncertainty for the U.S. economy forward in terms of longer run potential growth and productivity growth.

In short, read the original post - it is packed with highly informative and very important data and observations!

Source: https://macromon.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/deconstructing-the-u-s-jobs-market/

28/2/18: San Francisco Fed Research: Secular Stagnation Confirmed

This blog has been consistently warning about the continued pressures on the U.S. (and global) economy. In fact, bringing together two strands of research my a range of economists, I defined the term 'twin secular stagnations' to describe a trend of structural long term decline in the potential growth rates on

• The supply side of the U.S. economy (productivity growth and technological progress slowdowns, along with monopolization trends in the economy, or the supply side secular stagnation), and 
• The demand side  (excessive leverage, growing asymmetry in distribution of productive capital ownership, and ageing-induced changes in savings, consumption and investment, or the demand side secular stagnation).

The topic has not gone away, even though media commentariate in the U.S. and elsewhere have been fully consumed by the waves of optimism stemming from the tale of a 'robust growth' cycle.

Well, guess what: the 'spectacular' or 'tremendous' (using White House terminology) growth is largely a cyclical phenomena, as the latest research from the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco indicates.  You can read the full note here: https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/el2018-04.pdf. The core is in this chart:

You can see the flattening out and the decline in the cyclically-adjusted growth rate (the blue line).  This line shows us the rates of growth smoothing out the effects of growth-and-recessions cycles. Secular stagnation is still here: "As expected, the cyclical adjustment removes the sharp drop in actual output associated with the recession. But since then, the trajectory of the blue line is nowhere close to a straight line projection from the 2007 peak. Rather, cyclically adjusted output per person rose slowly after 2007 and then plateaued in recent years."

The authors link this worrying development to supply-side slowdown in productivity growth, and they clearly state that this slowdown in productivity growth pre-dates the Great Recession. In other words, the collapse in productivity growth is structural, not cyclical.

"The seeds of the disappointing growth in output were sown before the recession in the form of slow productivity growth and a declining labor force participation rate. Quantitatively, relative to the recoveries of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, cyclically adjusted output per person has grown about 1¾ percentage points per year more slowly since 2009. According to our analysis, about a percentage point of this is explained by the shortfall in productivity growth and about ¾ percentage

point is explained by the shortfall in labor force participation."

The latter is shocking!

So no, folks, the U.S. economy has not been doing 'ugely' well since 2009. It has not been doing better, either, than in the pre-crisis period. In fact, the U.S. economy has lost a lot of its long run economic growth potential. And so far, there is absolutely nothing anyone in Washington is willing to do about changing that long-term decline, because doing so will require deep reforms and rebalancing of the economy away from oligopolistic and monopolistic competition, away from rent seeking, away from rewarding physical capital at the expense of human capital, as well as reducing massive drags on demand side, including healthcare and education costs, debt overhang in households (especially younger cohorts), abating skyrocketing rents & property inflation in key urban locations, and so on. 

Care to suggest any party in Washington willing to tackle these?..

27/7/17: U.S. labor markets are not in rude health, yet

As we keep hearing about the wonders of the U.S. labor markets, there is an uneasy feeling that the analysts extolling the virtues of the Great Non-recovery are bending the facts. Yes, unemployment is down significantly, and, finally, in recent months the participation rate started to climb up, although it remains depressed by historical norms. But these are not the only metrics of jobs creation or employment. Much overlooked are other figures, that paint a much less pleasant picture.

So with this in mind, lets update some of my old charts relating to the side of the labor markets than majority of analysts have forgotten to mention.

First up: average duration of unemployment. In other words, a measure of how long it takes for a person to get back into the job.

Good news is: the decline in duration of unemployment continues.  Better news: we are well past the crisis-period peak. Bad news: duration is at around 2009 levels, so not even at the levels pre-crisis. Worse news: current duration is higher than that recorded at the peak of any other recession in modern history. That's right: with miraculous recovery, we have folks collecting longer unemployment benefits than at the peak of any previous recession.

That was in absolute terms. Now, let's look at how we are performing relative to each pre-recession expansion:

Again, good news: the horror show of the peak during the height of the Great Recession is gone now. But, again, bad news: we are still at the levels of relative duration comparable to 15 months into the Great Recession. And, again, the worst news: after 108 months of 'recovery' we are much worse off in terms of duration performance than in any other post-recessionary recovery since 1948.

But what about employment, you might ask? Aren't U.S. companies generating huge numbers of jobs that are being filled by the American workers? Err... ok...

No. Employment is not performing well. Current cycle (from the start of the Great Recession through today) is long. But it is also extremely shallow when it comes to employment. So shallow, that it marks the worst long cycle in history (per above chart) and, when compared to shorter cycles, ... again, the worst cycle in history. 1953 cycle was bad - sharper jobs destruction than current, but it ended faster and on a higher employment index level than the current one.

So no, things are not fine in the U.S. labor markets. Not by the measures which are harder to game than standard unemployment stats.

17/7/17: New Study Confirms Parts of Secular Stagnation Thesis

For some years I have been writing about the phenomena of the twin secular stagnations (see here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2015/07/7615-secular-stagnation-double-threat.html). And just as long as I have been writing about it, there have been analysts disputing the view that the U.S. (and global) economy is in the midst of a structural growth slowdown.

A recent NBER paper (see here http://www.nber.org/papers/w23543) clearly confirms several sub-theses of the twin secular stagnations hypothesis, namely that the current slowdown is

1. Non-cyclical (extend to prior to the Global Financial Crisis);
2. Attributable to "the slow growth of total factor productivity" 
3. And also attributable to "the decline in labor force participation".

19/12/16: Income Polarization in the U.S.: Building Blocks of Trumplitics

Having just reviewed some fresh evidence on the trends and underlying drivers of declining wage growth rates in the U.S. post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in the previous post here: , now let’s take a look at some current state of research on income inequality dynamics. In general, relative income dynamics can be driven by increases in income at the top of the income distribution relative to the rest of the distribution - the so-called 1% effect or inequality factor; or by decreases in income distribution at the bottom of distribution - another inequality factor; or they can be driven by the decline in incomes in the middle of income distribution relative to both top earners and bottom earners (polarisation).

A new study from the IMF concerns with the latter type of dynamic. Titled “Income Polarization in the United States” and authored by Ali Alichi, Kory Kantenga, Kory and Juan Solé, study documents “the rise of income polarization - what some have referred to as the 'hollowing out' of the income distribution - in the United States, since the 1970s.”

The key findings are:

“While in the initial decades more middle-income households moved up, rather than down, the income ladder, since the turn of the current century, most of polarization has been towards lower incomes.” In other words, the middle class is increasingly joining the poor, rather than the upper classes.

And this holds for all demographic cohorts or the U.S. population:

CHARTS: Middle-Income Population 1970-2014 (percent of total population with the same characteristic)

 So the younger cohorts are now experiencing more hollowing out of the middle class than the older cohorts and this trend started manifesting itself around 2000.

 Education no longer protects the middle class, either.

And in racial terms, there is more marked decline in the fortunes of the middle class for the whites, whilst the recovery of the 1990s-2007 period in the fortune of the African-Americans  has been reduce by more than 50 percent since the onset of the GFC.

Similarly to race trends, gender trends offer nothing to be proud of.

“…after conditioning on income and household characteristics, the marginal propensity to consume from permanent changes in income has somewhat fallen in recent years.” Put differently, when today’s middle class workers receive a wage increase, they tend to save more and spend less out of that increase than before. This can only occur if today’s middle class workers are saving more from wages increases. Incidentally, the authors also show that the same has taken place for higher income households.

Secular decreases in MPC can reflect either increased investment (from savings) or increased precautionary savings (including savings used to buffer against liquidity risks). Unfortunately, the authors do not look into which effect is at play here, or (if both are) which effect dominates.

And here is another conclusion from the authors worth noting: “Income polarization has risen substantially in the past four decades—much the same, if not even faster than inequality.”

Which, of course, helps explain why we are witnessing activist voting by the disenchanted, angry middle class voters. You can blame political candidates, you can blame the media, you can blame outside forces and powers. But you can't avoid one simple conclusion: the U.S. middle class is pis*ed off with the status quo. For one very good reason that the status quo doesn't work for them.


Full study here: Alichi, Ali and Kantenga, Kory and Solé, Juan A., Income Polarization in the United States (June 2016). IMF Working Paper No. 16/121. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2882555