Employment continues to grow (albeit at a slower pace), leading to the following key variable graph, drawn from the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee (plus monthly GDP and GDPNow).
figure 1: Non-farm employment, NFP (dark blue), civilian employment (orange), industrial production (red), 2012 personal income excluding transfers (green), 2012 manufacturing and trade sales $ (black), 2012 consumption Ch.2012$ (light blue), and monthly GDP for Ch.2012$ (pink), GDP (blue bars), GDPNow for Q2 2023 at 8/1, all log normalized to 2021M11=0 . Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA 2023Q2 via FRED advance release, S&P Global/IHS Markit (Nigeria Macroeconomic Consultant, IHS Markit) (8/1/2023 release) and the authors’ calculations.
as mentioned in this article Posts published about the employment situation, there are concerns that the official CES series is exaggerating employment. In Figure 2, I show some proxy indicators of employment activity (including hours worked).
figure 2: Private Nonfarm Payrolls from CES (bold blue), from ADP (lavender), total hours worked from CES (tan), early Philly Fed benchmarks (purple), all recorded in Nov 2021 = 0. The Philly Fed is calculated by subtracting the CES government payrolls from the Philly Fed’s earlier benchmark. Sources: BLS, ADP (via FRED), Philadelphia Fed, and authors’ calculations.
Note that sales are trending up across all collections throughout April, although some are selling much less than others. Since November 2021, both the ADP and BLS series are up by a percentage. On the other hand, growth in hours worked was lower than employment growth (3.9% vs. 5%).
