Yeah, there’s an argument to be made that hiring is down because the supply of qualified workers is drying up. I’ve been trying to hire an assistant and it is not going well. One of them even brought a toddler with her to the interview. I suppose I’m sympathetic - I single parent, myself - but overcoming that obstacle HAS to be part and parcel of putting one’s best foot forward.
In any event, I wouldn’t be surprised if a part of the lower number is due to uncertainty. If the American economy overall hates anything, it’s uncertainty. Not knowing which way things will go in the near term tends to make firms sit on the heels and wait. And Trump is uncertainty in human form. There’s no point in a firm committing to new projects and expansions if Trump will just do something to tank the market or make business more costly.
I’m crushed (aren’t we all? that’s the response I got - that we all want the economy to do well), but Ann Hedonia deserves some credit for being prophetic:
Personally, I’d guess the second option, or it’s possible it’s just some of the “bounciness” of our monthly jobs numbers. For example, in early 2015, monthly job growth went like this:
February = 267k
March = 78k
April = 282k
I’m no fan of Trump but for the time being, hiring now is as strong as I’ve seen it in years. If anything, any slowdown in hiring and is due to selectivity on the part of low to mid-wage workers. It may also be due to winter weather in the Northeast. Investment is still pretty strong and we’re looking at better profit margins in some of America’s largest companies thanks to the tax cuts. In the short run, Trump’s economy is looking okay.
In the longer term, things are potentially quite different. Regardless of whether Trump ultimately backs away from his threat of tariffs, the damage to our reputation as a credible and reliable trading partner is done and that will have an impact on how our trading partners allocate their risk in the American economy, even if they are attracted by the many firms that do business here. Some countries and investors in these countries (i.e. both public and private financial firms) may decide they can’t risk losing money because of bad politics. It’ll also strengthen ties between our allies and our foes. That’s one problem I see right away.
But in a lot of ways, the problem I’m seeing now are reminiscent of the late 1990s and early 2000s. We’ll pay a price for having too much faith in the private sector at some point.
The default assumption should be that any one month is always the result of normal variance in the jobs numbers. I mean that in the mathematical sense. February was good and March was bad, but both months fell within the 95% confidence band of what we would expect based on the last five years.
There is no need to look for deeper meaning based on a one month uptick or downtick. We can start looking for explanations when we get a few months in a row moving in the same direction.
The graph on the previously linked BLS page (link) has been pretty stable since like 2011. It doesn’t support an argument either way comparing Trump and Obama in the area of job creation.
I do not see how what she said was in any way untrue. Could you elaborate on what you felt she was being misleading about?
This is very true IME. 5 years ago, I could put out a craigslist ad, and get about a dozen of people looking for a job. Now I put out an ad on craigslist, facebook, google, through my payroll company, and ask my employees and clients to help me find someone, and I am lucky if I have more than 2 candidates to choose from.
This is also very true. I’ve been debating over whether I want to go through with an expansion. I think it is a good idea, and if everything goes even according to somewhat pessimistic projections, it still works out. But I don’t know for sure that things won’t actually turn out worse than that if there are crazy trade wars or actual wars. I’m also fighting against time, as these quarter percent increases the fed keeps making make a difference on a coupla hundred thousand dollar loan.
Yes, it definitely is. There is so much money out there looking for a place to be invested right now. I get calls constantly from every bank trying to get me to borrow money. I’ve had calls from investors wanting to invest in my business. The investor class has a ton of money, and nothing to do with it until demand picks up enough to start increasing supply again.
Is Lance Turbo a she? I didn’t know that. Anyways, I don’t think she was being misleading about anything. I think she was being satirical about the OP:
I had just finished a reply to you about your definition of “lie”, which apparently includes satire:
and I was making a bit of a personal joke. It was probably only humorous to me, and I’d rather it not become a major distraction to the thread topic. It probably would have been better if I’d left it out of this thread. Please consider it retracted.
My bad, I totally see how that post can be read that way. My intention was that “nice satire” was a response to Lance, but with the aside about Ann interjected in the middle, it was a muddled mess.
This answers a question that came up several times earlier in this thread. Thanks.
Seriously though, I hope you can find good people to hire.
Well, good luck with that, Trump has already got all the best people! If you have a division of your corporation that you need a Scott Pruitt for, someone to throw it to the floor and give it a jolly good rogering, you’re out of luck!
If your business model depends, for instance, on expanding the “Flint effect”. And you plan on getting a healthy profit on supplying water that won’t actually kill anybody, destroying meddlesome do=gooders like the EPA would be a shrewd option. Where you gonna find another Scott Pruitt, since Rick Perry is already deployed?
Who knows? Perhaps in my search for drinkable water uncontaminated by chemicals or alcohol, I may have to abandon my decades-long boycott of Coors! The horror!
Just in case you got the wrong impression, I was being tongue in cheek, maybe even satirical in that post. While a poor jobs report does make it easier to hire and retain good employees, I actually prefer that the economy does well overall.
But, it is important to remember that a better economy brings with it higher prices and interest rates. The idea is to have the economy perform well enough to increase wages faster than inflation, which is actually entirely possible if most of the produced wealth stays with those whose labor produced that wealth, as opposed to those who are looking for ever increasing profits in their investment.
Thanks. Managing humans as a resource is much easier if you don’t have any more empathy for them than if they were raw materials feeding into your factory, but I find it a bit hard to treat people that way.
Yes, I thought my observation was fairly straightforward and possibly the least satirical thing I’ve ever written.
Or maybe I just see it because it’s similar to the trajectory of my personal income during my years in commissioned sales. Some months I might get a check for $2000 and some months it might be $20,000.00. And that was mostly because I dealt with a relative small number of very large orders. The monthly variances weren’t in any way a reflection of how much business I was writing, it was really just a timing issue. They were meaningless and I never freaked out or celebrated. The yearly numbers were a little more meaningful but still subject to the same “bounciness”, but we had tricks we pulled out in December to either force business forward into the current year or detain it until the next year.
