Month: January 2016

By Thomas Cooley, Ben Griffy and Peter Rupert

Today’s release of the “advance” estimate for GDP for 2015 QIV shows 2015 ending with a dud as growth slowed throughout the year. Real GDP increased only 0.7% at a seasonally adjusted annual rate. Both real GDP and real personal consumption expenditures (PCE) have taken a decidedly downward turn. The weak numbers were widely anticipated, presaged by falling industrial production, declining exports and weak consumer demand. The question on everyone’s mind is whether this portends a more prolonged contraction in the economy.

Looking at previous business cycles, it is clear that this recovery, while weak, is beginning to look mature.  Job growth has continued strong and the unemployment rate is low  but this recovery has been in progress for several years now.  What are the forces weighing on economic growth that would tip the economy into a contraction?

Exports have shown gradual flattening out and then more recently a decline precipitated by weak demand elsewhere in the world and a strong dollar. Expectations are that this will continue and continue to pull down U.S. growth.  Consumption was also weaker in the fourth quarter after looking stronger earlier. PCE slowed to 2.2% after growing 3.6% and 3.0% in QII and QIII, respectively. Moreover, as the graph below shows, once PCE goes south it takes a while to reverse course. Investment in non-residential structures (-5.3%) and equipment (-2.5%) fell sharply, leading to an overall investment decline of -2.5%. Residential structures, however, grew at 8.1%.

 

 

Headwinds

The U.S. economy has always been an important driver for growth elsewhere in the world. As the first picture below shows the fate of the U.S. economy is closely aligned with the fate of nearest and most important trading partners, Mexico and the U.S. but in the age of globalization other trading partners – China, Europe Japan are very important as well. As you can see from the following charts, Europe and Japan are stagnant and the emerging markets, while not completely foundering, are likely not to lift others, particularly as China’s growth slows.  These are serious concerns for the future strength of the U.S. recovery.

 

 

 

by Thomas Cooley, Ben Griffy and Peter Rupert

The December employment situation delivered this morning from the BLS showed continued strength across the board. Payroll employment increased 292,000 and the news gets better as payrolls were revised up for both October (+9,000) and November (+41,000). The mining and logging sector continued to decline, falling another 8,000 after falling 11,000 in November and 1,000 in October as a result of the continued decline in oil prices. The motor vehicle and parts sector also fell for the third straight month, shedding 6,500 jobs over that time span.

Most of the job gains were in the service sector with health care and temporary services showing significant gains. In the goods producing sector most of the gains were in construction.

Average weekly hours were essentially unchanged as were average hourly earnings.  The latter is important because it means that strong job growth has not yet generated more upward pressure on wages.  But a more careful look at wages is provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s wage tracker. It shows across a broad set of categories a three month moving average of median wage growth of roughly 3.1% . This is a sign of a healthy labor market. The labor force participation rate and the employment population ratio also inched up very slightly. These strong results provide some validation for the Federal Reserve’s first interest rate hike in nearly a decade, which occurred in December.

Global weakness as well as falling oil prices still loom on the horizon. On two separate occasions this week, the Chinese stock market fell by more than 7 percent, prompting a halt to trading on Wednesday. Uncertainty about the interest rate environment, as well as concern about the Chinese stock market caused the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 to close down, despite the strong jobs report. This, among other data concerns prompted GDP Now, a predictive algorithm maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, to revise its estimate of quarterly GDP in the fourth quarter of 2015 from 1.0 percent to 0.8 percent.

Many observers noted weakness in the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter – signs that showed up mainly in the purchasing managers indices and industrial production. So far that pressure has not appeared in the U.S.  labor market.  The number of people employed part time for economic reasons has continued to decline as has the duration of unemployment.

How long this recovery can continue in the face of much global turmoil remains to be seen, but for the time being the major puzzles of the labor market seem to be structural not cyclical.  We will discuss these structural issues in a subsequent post.

Average hours of work remained at 34.5 and average hourly pay fell slightly to $25.24 from $25.25.