US Jobs Market Takes Center Stage Amid Macro Angst
If the Fed's goal is to engineer a reverse wealth effect by tightening financial conditions such that stocks retreat and the pace of home price appreciation cools, policymakers have had some success.
As the second half dawns, equities are coming off the worst start to a calendar year since 1970, and although home prices remain buoyant, it's just a matter of time before the kind of seller concessions seen in select locales become a fixture of the market nationwide.
In short: The $40 trillion bo
Caveat, this is all anecdotal, but in my neck of the woods, the Northeast, and in my recent travels, Denver and the Colorado Rockies, people have money to spend and are spending it. This is not a bad thing — more a reminder that the Fed’s work is not done.
It is hard to suss out how stale many of those job openings in the JOLTS numbers are. Posted for two years just because it is easy to leave them in online recruiting boards? Along with a mess of H-1B required ads for jobs at compensation everyone knows no American will accept?
Does the St Louis Fed make any effort to dive into this data?
H-Man, it would seem “good news” on the employment front will be “bad news” for the market while “bad news” on the employment front will be “bad news” for equities. Not often that you win whether the coin flip is heads or tails.
“impossible to predict” isn’t quite true: while I didn’t believe them there were those pointing out high inflation and serious concerns about Russia’s build-up in January 2022, moreover merely extending from the bonkers jump from April 2020 through November 2021 was not “good analysis”.
One challenge is looking at a lot of lagging indicators when you want course correction in realtime. It’s almost as if Amazon, Walmart, and Hotel.com and OpenTable could give the Fed a better data stream?