Small & Medium size businesses hiring; Large pausing; everyone reluctant to fire...

[mshan]

http://www.morningstar.com/Cover/videoCenter.aspx?id=559062

Said small and medium size businesses are hiring.

Large corporations are on net hold and shuffling people around as needed.

Everyone apparently reluctant to fire because, although it is easy to fire, if business picks up in future, finding another person with the right qualifications for job can be hard.

Headwinds include HP and Best Buy restructuring, along with government pulling back.

Just like May, seasonal adjustment for tomorrow's jobs report is huge (10x actual number reported).

 

[Texashiker]

My wife landed a new job last monday. The company has around 1,500 employees.

I sure hope the economy is picking up.

 

[mshan]

From what I've seen on financial news, economy overall seems to be muddling along at 2% GDP growth.

Ben Bernanke has a theory that large surge in hirings from last fall to this spring was a one time reversal of the mass layoffs companies made when stock market plunged post-Lehman 2008 and everyone said they had no visibility about what was going to happen.

Bernanke said Fed's goal for job growth now is 150k - 200k jobs / month, and considered 100K a net standstill (just keeps up with population growth). Others have said 100k / month correlates with around 2% gdp growth.

Regarding tomorrow's jobs report, it seems like there may be a large fudge factor in terms of how government can choose to report that number, and this is a political year. "Seasonal adjustment factor" is about 10x the number of jobs that will be reported, so possibility of error is great. Bob Johnson from Morningstar video last month said most jobs are created right around this time of year, I think he said 854,000 created last month, but number is seasonally adjusted so you can compare different months, so that's how you got 69,000 jobs last month.