Employment is still a wilted green shoot

The monthly Employment Situation report for August did not have much in the way of good news other than that it continued the "less bad" trend of recent months. Unemployment continues to trend up. Employment continues to trend down, but at a slower rate of decline. None of this is "good" per se, but is par for the course at such an early stage of a recovery. The expectation is that it will take another four to ten months for employment to stabilize and start rising again and for unemployment to begin trending down again. All of that is as expected and perfectly within the realm of reason for the early stages of a complex economic recovery.

So, for now call this a wilted green shoot.

My personal expectation is that we will start to see growth in employment somewhere in the November to March timeframe. Unfortunately, unemployment may not begin a sustained decline until later in the spring.

-- Jack Krupansky