The monthly employment report for February will be coming out on Friday. Although the employment trend tends to be rather volatile, this report will give us a fairly good clue as to whether the economy is hanging in there or falling off a cliff into recession.
Normal monthly volatility (noise) might be in a range of +150,000 to -150,000 jobs. That's a mere +/- 0.1% of the current payroll employment of 137,258,000.
If we see a loss of jobs worse than -250,000 (and see that order of loss for multiple near-consecutive months), then it will be safe to presume that the economy is really hurting, but if we see any kind of gain or only a modest loss within the range of volatility, then we need to give the economy a free pass for another month. In my view, the economy has quite a number of semi-decent months ahead of it.
-- Jack Krupansky
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