« The Employment Report, Part 1 | Main | About That Productivity Report... »
May 06, 2006
The Employment Report, Part 2
On to the jobs part of the jobs report, The Skeptical Speculator brings on the basics, from Reuters:
U.S. employers added 138,000 jobs in April, far fewer than had been expected...
It revised March job growth down to 200,000 from 211,000 originally estimated and February down to 200,000 from 225,000.
The unemployment rate was unchanged from March at 4.7 percent...
As to the sources of jobs gains, the pattern by employment type looked fairly comparable to that of last year with a bit taken off the top...
... the obvious exceptions being a hot-looking manufacturing and a very chilly-looking retail sector. What to make of it? BizzyBlog says...
Overall — I’ll take it, but repeat performances are not welcome.
... and that sounds OK to me. But for Barry Ritholtz's taste, the economic porridge is not just right:
Quite bluntly, we simply do not see the Goldilocks scenario -- strong GDP, modest employment improvement, well contained inflation -- as supported by the data.
Shucks.
May 6, 2006 in Labor Markets | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c834f53ef00d83425927653ef
Listed below are links to blogs that reference The Employment Report, Part 2:
» The Jobs Report from BizzyBlog.com
138,000 jobs added okay.
Previous months revised downward a total of about 36,000, for a net of just over 100,000 Hmm.
Unemployment stays at 4.7% Thats good.
Overall Ill take it, but repeat performances... [Read More]
Tracked on May 7, 2006 12:17:07 PM
Comments
Posted by:
Jeremy |
May 07, 2006 at 02:53 AM
The weakness in the retail sector is probably explained by their trying to rebuild productivity growth. Retailers are facing price increases across the board that they are not able to pass through -- the deflator for GAFO goods is falling at a 2% rate. So the only way they can rebuild margins is by cutting labor cost and creating productivity.
Posted by:
spencer |
May 07, 2006 at 10:51 AM
I'm surprised I haven't heard more about the fact that the net birth/death adjustment in April employment report was +271,000.
That's double the purported job creation for the month.