It’s hard to imagine that the muddled jobs picture could possibly get any murkier, but it is. Between ADP’s ‘Purge Effect,’ archaic seasonality adjustments (i.e., UPS and FedEx are still not fully accounted for in seasonal holiday hiring models), constant backwards revisions from the Department of Labor (a game ADP is now even playing), and [...]
Cheering for a positive jobs report from the Department of Labor these days is quite similar to cheering for the Minnesota Vikings of late; I’m always hopeful but there just isn’t much in the statistics to get too encouraged about. And unfortunately, the November jobs data published by LinkUp a month ago doesn’t bode well [...]
Like clockwork every month, the pundits on Bloomberg and CNBC state definitively that THIS month’s jobs report is certainly the most widely anticipated report in recent memory. Unfortunately, I cannot argue their claim. With each passing month that the U.S. economy spends stuck in the quagmire of the 2nd Great Contraction, with its horrifically high [...]
I’m not typically one who looks for or pays attention to signs from the cosmos, but it was a truly bizarre coincidence that as I was assembling the output from our jobs forecasting model and started to get a sense of what the picture looked like, Cat Stevens’ Trouble began playing on KEXP’s stream. (Seriously [...]
For the 2nd consecutive month, LinkUp is reporting that both new and total job listings indexed from company websites rose from the prior month. In September, new job listings increased from August by 19,095 (5%), while total job listings rose by 36,388 (4%). LinkUp is the largest, fastest growing job search engine that only indexes [...]
Last week’s horrendous jobs report, which indicated that the U.S. economy added no jobs in August, was particularly brutal for a number of reasons. First, it was a stark, kick-in-the-gut reminder that we are deep in the midst of what Kenneth Rogoff (Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard) rightly calls the ’2nd Great [...]
With each month that unemployment in the U.S. remains stubbornly high, focus on the government’s ‘official’ monthly jobs report grows increasingly intense. Unfortunately, while the anticipation surrounding tomorrow’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reached new levels, so too has the uncertainty around what the report will say about job growth across the [...]
Despite the turmoil in the markets, fueled in part by the prospect of a double-dip recession and continued weakness in the jobs market (yesterday’s small increase in initial unemployment claims didn’t help), there continue to be some positive signs in LinkUp’s jobs data. First, based on the increase in both new and total job listings [...]
Last Wednesday, LinkUp issued its 60-day jobs forecast based on data from its national job search engine. Our forecast for August and September is based on the number of new and total job listings indexed from over 22,000 corporate websites throughout the U.S. in June and July. The increase and decrease in these job openings [...]
There is no question that the gloom surrounding the U.S. economy in general and job growth in particular is well founded. Economists have recently slashed their GDP forecasts for the remainder of the year with the specter of a double-dip recession rearing its ugly head once again, and all signs point to persistently high unemployment [...]