– by a New Deal Democrat
“financial markets fiscal crises gold standard employment reports slowdown Q4”
I have a post up at Seeking Alpha on the behavior of stocks, bonds and consumers during the 3 fiscal crises of the last decade. Hint: recessions are always disinflationary.
Also of interest: the “gold standard” of employment data is the county’s quarterly Employment and Wages Report, which is not a sample, but a full census of 95% of all businesses. Unfortunately, there are two drawbacks: (1) it doesn’t get reported until almost 6 months later, and (2) it can be reviewed for a full year or more after that.
With these caveats, year-over-year employment through last December slowed from 4.3% at the end of Q3 to +2.6% and a total of 152,318,000 jobs:
This compares to the monthly jobs report, which rose +3.2% year over year (red, left scale) at 154,535,000 jobs (blue, right scale):
