What Government Shutdown? A Shutdown of Data?
The week started where we left off last week with further analysis of the Rocking December Jobs Report. It also started and ended where we were at the end of the last week - in a partial Government Shutdown.
(Jan. 7) The December Jobs Report was strong. If you dig into the data you will find that President Trump and former President Clinton are the only Presidents who have cut unemployment, added full-time jobs, and seen their workforce participation rates increase from their inauguration after 23 months in office. The article "Five Presidents at 23 Months: Participating" did just that.
(Jan. 8) The jobs report received this month was the December Employment Situation Report. This week we received the November JOLTS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data. We set "November JOLTS Records, Plural." We set November records for Job Openings, Quits, Separations, and Hires. Three of the four sectors that had the highest quits, separations, hires and job openings have the lowest weekly wages.
(Jan. 9) This column writes a number of articles on the Jobs Report data."Men and Women: Record Levels of December Jobs" shows how there were a an all-time record women working this month and that men had their best December ever.It also details how we are missing millions of male and female workers. It also digs into the multiple job worker data.
(Jan. 10) The first week of January is traditionally the worst week for First-time unemployment claims during the course of a year. We had the lowest non-seasonally adjusted level of first-time claims since January 1973. But wait, there's more. We have more than 80 million more covered insured (workers) now than we had during 1967-1973 and only 4,000 more first-time claims. There is a similar story for the continuing claims data.
(Jan. 10) Virtually every data set has an "advance," "preliminary," and "final" version of the current month's data. Normally there are revisions to the advance data the following month. Normally there are revisions to the preliminary data the month after that. Almost all organization have a year in review. The article "2019: Year in Review, Year in Revisions" details how the "Jobs" data, the "ADP Payroll Report Data," The MARTS Retail data, and the GDP data" were all significantly revised this year. The revisions were significant enough to revise the narrative.
(Jan. 11) This column publishes forecast articles as well as articles that report on the data in the various economic reports, published by the government, over the course of the year. Right now there are some reports for which forecast articles are written that may not be published due to the Government Shutdown. One of the reports that may not be released is the Monthly MARTS Retail Report. That is unfortunate. The article "December Retail Report Could Be Huge If..." details how the data should grow month to month, and December to December, setting both December records for sales and an first time ever $6 trillion in total sales for 2018. The report could be huge, if only it is released.
(Jan. 11) The Federal Reserve has two "mandates:" Full-employment and inflation around 2.00%. There is an economic theory that you can have low unemployment at the expense of higher inflation. The theory goes that you can have low inflation only with higher unemployment. This is called the Phillips Curve. The Phillips Curve was broken during the 1990s by the "Greenspan Curve," when we had low unemployment and low inflation. The Phillips Curve was broken another time by the "Obama Curve." We achieved low unemployment as a result of low participation. We saw the official CPI inflation rate drop below 2% during December. That is not the whole story. You can find out more in "December Inflation. What Inflation?"
The Government Shutdown is a Government Data Shutdown. We did not receive the November New Home Sales data last month. It appears that we will not receive the December MARTS retail report, the December New Home Construction report, the December new home Sales Report, or the Advance Fourth Quarter GDP report.
If the people who produce the reports are non-essential employees are the report non-essential reports? If the reports are essential reports are the employees essential workers? They are 880,000 non-essential employees. If they earn $50,000 a year, chump change for Washington DC, the non-essential employees are costing up 44 billion dollars a year. Some may be essential workers. Some may not be essential. These reports are important. Are they essential? To me, Yes. To you.....
The Debt Clock continues rolling. There was considerable attention paid to the debt clock at former President George W. Bush clicked over the debt-ometer to $10,000,000,000,000 (Ten Trillion Dollars.) The Debt Clock was "forgotten" as former President Obama took the debt from $10 trillion to $19.875 trillion. It's back. We spent $521.553 billion dollars on interest last year. That is $1.429 billion dollars a day - every day of the shutdown - every day of the year.We are on day 21 days plus a few hours. We have spent over $30 billion on interest on the debt since the $5.7 billion dollar border security shutdown started.
The data is good. We will receive most of the economic data we need. We may not need all 880,000 employees. There are 22.8 million government employees (State, Local and Federal.) The shutdown "only" impacts 880,000 federal government employees furloughed. There are 151.1 million non-farm payroll workers, which includes government workers. This means that only 0.6% of our workforce is directly impacted by the shutdown. The other 99.4% have their jobs. There is some concern that this shutdown will impact the headline "Jobs" number for January. Next week this column will go into detail about how it should not impact the jobs streak at all.
It's the economy.