With the April payrolls release (Bloomberg Consensus 428K > 391K), we have the following charts of key metrics noted by the NBER BCDC.
figure 1: Nonfarm employment (dark blue), industrial production (red), 2012 personal income excluding transfers (green), 2012 manufacturing and trade sales (black), 2012 consumption (light blue), and 2012 Monthly GDP (pink) for January of the year, all log normalized to 2020M02=0. NBER defines recession dates, peaks and valleys, shades of gray. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, IHS Markit (nee Macroeconomic Advisers) (published May 2, 2022), NBER, and author’s calculations.
Note that employment continued to trend upward in the first quarter when GDP turned negative.This underscores the reason for the recession call no Calculated based on GDP only.
The number of payrolls has been revised down slightly in previous months. This is a comparison of the official NFP series from the Institutional Survey (CES) with the civilian employment series and the civilian employment series adjusted to the NFP concept (the latter two from the Household Survey, CPS).
figure 2: Nonfarm employment (blue), civilian employment (green), and civilian employment adjusted to the concept of nonfarm employment (red), all on a logarithmic scale in 000s, sa. Recession dates as defined by NBER are shaded from peak to trough in gray. Source: BLS via FRED, BLSNational Bureau of Economic Research.
While I don’t put much weight on monthly employment developments in the household survey overall, it’s reassuring to see that all three series are up: 4.2% for NFP and 5.9% for CES adjusted for NFP concept, both in 3 Monthly changes are annualized.
Jason Furman learns more about job postings and their impact. this CEA Data is also discussed.
