Here is Morningstar economist Bob Johnson's video commentary on today's BLS monthly jobs number: http://www.morningstar.com/Cover/videoCenter.aspx?id=569632 (just saw it there; haven't viewed it yet)
He also releases a written summary of all the week's economic data, usually Saturday morning on Morningstar website.
And like he has been saying all year, when you filter out all of the short-term noise and start looking at year over year trends on 3 month moving average basis, I am guessing he will again say we are at same about 150k / mo., 2% real GDP muddle through economy we have been in for the last year or two.
Third quarter GDP to be released later this month is already going to take an about 0.5% hair cut from drought (corn and soybeans), but there may be a disconnect occurring between Main Street America (domestic companies with domestic workforce) and what's going on with multi-nationals (perhaps have healthy North American unit, but international operations are bleeding money), and as long as serious layoffs don't start occuring at lots of companies in U. S. (not restructuring such as Best Buy, HP, downsizing in financial industry), so that U. S. consumer still feels they have decent disposable income (after inflation) and are comfortable they won't lose their job, and just continue to spend (2/3 of our economy is consumption, and 2/3 of that is services, not goods), we should be ok.
But we do need a faster rate of growth to pull in more of the unemployed who may need on the job training that employers are not often ready to provide because demand hasn't picked up sufficiently, yet.
He also releases a written summary of all the week's economic data, usually Saturday morning on Morningstar website.
And like he has been saying all year, when you filter out all of the short-term noise and start looking at year over year trends on 3 month moving average basis, I am guessing he will again say we are at same about 150k / mo., 2% real GDP muddle through economy we have been in for the last year or two.
Third quarter GDP to be released later this month is already going to take an about 0.5% hair cut from drought (corn and soybeans), but there may be a disconnect occurring between Main Street America (domestic companies with domestic workforce) and what's going on with multi-nationals (perhaps have healthy North American unit, but international operations are bleeding money), and as long as serious layoffs don't start occuring at lots of companies in U. S. (not restructuring such as Best Buy, HP, downsizing in financial industry), so that U. S. consumer still feels they have decent disposable income (after inflation) and are comfortable they won't lose their job, and just continue to spend (2/3 of our economy is consumption, and 2/3 of that is services, not goods), we should be ok.
But we do need a faster rate of growth to pull in more of the unemployed who may need on the job training that employers are not often ready to provide because demand hasn't picked up sufficiently, yet.
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