Most expected to see 130,000-140,000 jobs lost in November. The net change in non-farm payrolls for November was a miniscule decrease of 11,000. This is in contrast to a perceived 190,000 jobs lost in October and 463,000 lost in June. These gains were mostly from temporary services, a strong indicator that we are indeed in a recovery and that full time jobs will soon follow. Not only that, but the September numbers were revised down (219,000 to 139,000) and October numbers were revised (190,000 down to 111,000), showing that a total of 159,000 jobs believed lost were not.
Better yet, for the first time in many months we saw unemployment decrease from 10.2% in October to 10% in November. Moody's Economy expected unemployment to peak at 10.7% in mid-2010, so this is terrific news.
Average weekly hours also increased by .6.
The bleak side of the newly released information was that hourly wages only increased .1% last month, showing a shy 2.2% raise in the past year.
Unemployment is still high, and it will be an arduous climb back to full production, but at the least there are plenty of strong indicators that show we are heading in the right direction.
(Information courtesy of Dismal Scientist, always a good resource)
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I was woundering if the sudden improvement in unemployment might actually be caused by temporary seasonal hires? I know in retail there is a great boost in hires due to the Christmas season. I'm not sure about other industries. Do you know where the improvement is based? Which indurties are showing increase?
ReplyDeleteHistorically, seasonal hires aren't as significant as the changes we're seeing. It is certainly a portion of it, but it isn't most of it. Not only that, but seasonanal hires would not have affected October or September numbers at all, which were lower than expected. Even with the adjusted numbers, and taking into consideration seasonal hiring, most economists expected net payroll losses to drop 50,000 into november, but we saw a drop of 100,000. That's significant.
ReplyDeleteA perfect graph to complement your discussion can be seen on Brad Delong's blog (it's currently on the very top of the page).
ReplyDeletehttp://delong.typepad.com/sdj/