Jeffrey Speakes Downgrade On Friday, August 5 after the market close, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) announced a downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt from AAA to AA+. This announcement followed Congressional approval of a debt limit increase and ten year plan to cut projected deficit relative to baseline by $2.1 trillion. Evidently, the debt deal was… Read more

Michael Puente and Dan Hamilton The BLS’s July Employment Situation was released today. Non-farm jobs grew by 117,000, highly focused on healthcare, (31,000), retail, (26,000), manufacturing, (24,000), and mining (9,000). Despite the increase in jobs, the measured employment level, an alternate measure of workers, decreased. That decrease was met by a larger decrease to the… Read more

Continuing my commentary on last Friday’s GDP release, here is a chart showing the revisions to real GDP growth. It might seem like some quarters are up and some are down, in effect a wash. Despite that appearance, on net, the new measure implies that growth was slower during the 2007 through 2011 quarter 1… Read more

As we and other analysts have already mentioned, the GDP report released Friday indicates that growth was slower than we thought and inflation was higher than we thought during the 2007 to 2010 period. 2011 quarter 2 economic growth was 1.3 percent. Some details include: • Consumption growth was essentially zero • The BEA savings… Read more

The United States GDP data release this morning was dismal. The overall conclusions from this report are that: • Economic growth was weaker than we thought during 2007 to 2010 • Inflation was higher than we thought during 2007 to 2010 • Consumption spending was weaker than we thought during 2007 to 2010 • Output… Read more

The BLS’s Employment Situation report for June was released today. Non-farm jobs and the unemployment rate both grew slightly. Jobs grew by 18,000, which on a base of 131 million jobs, is essentially the same as our forecast of 21,000. The unemployment rate was 9.2 percent, essentially the same as our forecast of 9.15 percent.… Read more

The United States Employment Situation was released this morning and the glimmer of hope that I had been nurturing as the February, March, and April data came out has been weakened. While the May public sector jobs result was like I forecasted, the private sector jobs result was much weaker. Non-farm jobs increased 54 thousand… Read more

This is a short note about our forecast of the May labor market. We are still bearish on the overall economy with the usual suspects: banking, real estate, and the labor market weighing against vigorous growth. From the April results, the broad measure of unemployment (including under-employed & marginally attached to labor force) was still… Read more

For about six quarters we have watched various measures of strong United States economic performance: Corporate profits have been very strong. The Dow has almost doubled since the early 2009 bottom of about 6,600. Productivity has been strong. During 2010 quarter 4, consumption grew 4 percent, significantly above the 3.4 percent post-war average, and consumption… Read more

This is a short note about our forecast of the April labor market.  The data comes out this Friday, May 6. Our labor market forecast is improving, slowly. Both February and March nonfarm payrolls increased by about 200 thousand, and we are tentatively confident that about 180 thousand can occur in April. This forecast reflects… Read more