All good things....

[Arkady]

The US had been experiencing the longest run of uninterrupted job creation in its entire history -- by a huge margin. The streak started way back in October 2010, covering most of Obama's presidency and blowing away the prior record by years. Unfortunately, it has come to an end. In September, the economy lost 33,000 jobs.

There's no reason to panic, yet, since the hurricanes certainly hurt. But, it suggests we've gotten to a point where the market isn't as robust as it once was. For example, in the Obama years we had a number of hurricanes and other disasters that hit without breaking the winning streak. Most notably we had Superstorm Sandy, which was bigger than any of the recent hurricanes to hit the US, and hit us right in our economic heart, and yet the job boom kept chugging along with barely a slow-down. Similarly, in the Bush years, the economy created jobs in the months surrounding Hurricane Katrina.

This came as a shock to economists, who had predicted a slowdown in hiring, to 80,000 jobs created, due to the weather, but didn't anticipate a big loss.

 

[as seen on tv]

link to an article that gives a reason OTHER than hurricanes, please.

there aren't any, lol

 

[Caroljo]

The US had been experiencing the longest run of uninterrupted job creation in its entire history -- by a huge margin. The streak started way back in October 2010, covering most of Obama's presidency and blowing away the prior record by years. Unfortunately, it has come to an end. In September, the economy lost 33,000 jobs.

There's no reason to panic, yet, since the hurricanes certainly hurt. But, it suggests we've gotten to a point where the market isn't as robust as it once was. For example, in the Obama years we had a number of hurricanes and other disasters that hit without breaking the winning streak. Most notably we had Superstorm Sandy, which was bigger than any of the recent hurricanes to hit the US, and hit us right in our economic heart, and yet the job boom kept chugging along with barely a slow-down. Similarly, in the Bush years, the economy created jobs in the months surrounding Hurricane Katrina.

This came as a shock to economists, who had predicted a slowdown in hiring, to 80,000 jobs created, due to the weather, but didn't anticipate a big loss.

Superstorm Sandy was BIGGER than Harvey? LMAO!!!!! You just hate that Trump is doing such a great job supporting all those people that lost everything and building those areas back up. Sucks to be you! But you keep repeating your BS, someone believes it.

 

[Arkady]

Superstorm Sandy was BIGGER than Harvey?

Yes. Vastly. That's common knowledge. Were you unaware of that? If so, I'm happy to have relieved you of some small measure of your heavy burden of ignorance.

You can watch this whole video to get a view of all the major modern hurricane sizes, but scrub to 1:26 if you only want to see Sandy and Harvey. Harvey is the itty bitty one two rows below Sandy, on the far left.

As you can see, Harvey had a diameter of 400 km. Sandy had a diameter of 1,800 km, and was the largest ever to hit the US. In terms of total area, Sandy covered 2,543,400 square km, versus 125,600 square km for Harvey, making Sandy a bit more than 20 times larger than Harvey. There's a reason Sandy gets referred to as a "superstorm," rather than just a "hurricane." Harvey caused a whole lot of damage in one fairly small area.

Sandy was big enough to span the entire Northeast:

 

[Deleted member 21794]

It will be interesting to see the job stats in the coming months. One would think repairing damage from two major hurricanes (I don't think territories like Puerto Rico are counted in job creation, but don't know for certain) would result in nice job creation numbers.

We shall see.

 

[Arkady]

link to an article that gives a reason OTHER than hurricanes, please.

there aren't any, lol

I haven't heard other explanations. But neither did I hear a satisfying explanation for why it's been so many months since monthly job creation surpassed the 0.15% level. That used to be commonplace. In Obama's whole second term, the job market never went more than five months in a row below that level. Yet now, we've been below that threshold for seven straight months. Obviously, that can't all be attributed to hurricanes.

How bad is it? Well, since Trump took office, the number of payroll jobs has grown by 0.77%. That's not horrible. But it compares to 1.16% for the same length period at the end of the Obama presidency, so payrolls were growing over 50% faster before Trump took the helm. In fact, to find a period of this length when payrolls expanded as little as they have since Trump took office, you'd need to go back to the period that ended in early 2011, when we were still staggering in the wake of the financial crisis.

To be forgiving, I guess we could just attribute it to the maturity of the business cycle. By the time Trump took office, the economy was in its 92nd month of growth, making it the third-oldest growth cycle in all of American history. Since then, it's gotten still older -- it'll soon pass the Kennedy/Johnson boom, if a recession doesn't start soon, leaving it second only to the Clinton boom. The longer a boom goes on, the closer you get to "full employment," and the fewer jobs you can add per month. In such a situation, a hurricane or other temporary issue may be enough to push job creation into negative territory, since the baseline is already pretty low (we'd created only 138,000 jobs in July, before these hurricanes started hitting).

I guess we'll see. Does job creation come roaring back strongly, as after Sandy -- by December 2012, we had 244,000 job created in a single month. Or is this weakness a sign of things to come? Time will tell.

 

[Arkady]

It will be interesting to see the job stats in the coming months. One would think repairing damage from two major hurricanes (I don't think territories like Puerto Rico are counted in job creation, but don't know for certain) would result in nice job creation numbers.

We shall see.

History would suggest we should have a strong jobs rebound, since hurricanes free up emergency funds and justify lots of borrowing, to finance rebuilding. After Sandy, in late 2012, early 2013, monthly job creation soared: 244,000, 211,000, and 286,000 jobs per month during the quarter starting in December.

 

[Dino]

The US had been experiencing the longest run of uninterrupted job creation in its entire history -- by a huge margin. The streak started way back in October 2010, covering most of Obama's presidency and blowing away the prior record by years. Unfortunately, it has come to an end. In September, the economy lost 33,000 jobs.

There's no reason to panic, yet, since the hurricanes certainly hurt. But, it suggests we've gotten to a point where the market isn't as robust as it once was. For example, in the Obama years we had a number of hurricanes and other disasters that hit without breaking the winning streak. Most notably we had Superstorm Sandy, which was bigger than any of the recent hurricanes to hit the US, and hit us right in our economic heart, and yet the job boom kept chugging along with barely a slow-down. Similarly, in the Bush years, the economy created jobs in the months surrounding Hurricane Katrina.

This came as a shock to economists, who had predicted a slowdown in hiring, to 80,000 jobs created, due to the weather, but didn't anticipate a big loss.

Welcome to the reality of "full employment."

 

[Arkady]

Welcome to the reality of "full employment."

We're surely close to full employment, but I'd argue we're not there, yet. My reasoning:

(1) "Full employment" is supposed to result in inflation, since employers are competing for employees, driving up labor costs, yet labor becomes a constraint on economic growth, so the supply of goods and services can't keep up. In reality, inflation remains low -- less than 2% over the last year, which is below the Fed's target.

(2) Inflation, while low, has been significantly lower in the past. Right now we're at 4.2%. We got as low as 3.8% in the Clinton years, 3.4% in the Johnson years, and between 3.4% and 2.5% for almost a three-year period spanning the late Truman and the early Eisenhower era. I suppose a more dynamic economy would mean more people "between jobs" at any given moment, raising the floor for the unemployment rate, but it still seems like it should be possible to push rates well below 4%.

(3) The labor participation rate for age 25 to 54 is good, in historical terms, but still not up to where it was in the Clinton era. It's about 82%, compared to an average of around 84% in the late Clinton years. That suggests that there are still a meaningful number of people not counting in the official "unemployment rate" who could nonetheless be coaxed into the labor force if pay/benefits/etc. were good enough (e.g., stay-at-home parents who aren't in the labor force because pay still isn't high enough to cover the high cost of daycare).

On that last point, though, here's a pet theory of mine: maybe we "broke" the Millennials, by allowing the unemployment rate to stay high for so long, especially for young people, in the years after the financial crisis. This may have caused a fundamental shift in the culture of that generation. Millions of them either had to think of themselves as failures, for being unable to find a decent job for so long, or they had to come up with a way to think about success and failure that wasn't tied to a career. This may have caused that generation to abandon the rat-race mentality that has defined broader American culture since WWII, in favor of something more like European culture. That would include less attention to material well-being. Thus, you could get a generation where fewer people care about "keeping up with the Joneses," and nobody is looking for a chance to brag about owning a new car or a McMansion, and instead people take pride in non-material things, and even in bargain-hunting and austerity.

One could argue that was a good or a bad thing. But, either way, the expected outcome would be a generation that is much more comfortable with long periods of unemployment or underemployment, driving down the labor force participation rate for prime-aged workers, and driving up alternate measures of labor-underutilization.

 

[marvin martian]

Welcome to the reality of "full employment."

Exactly. Unemployment continued to decrease, hovering close to 4% now. If any on the left were capable of rational analysis, this effect would be obvious. Sadly, all the left seems to be able to do now is alternately weep and lash out violently.