Steady as she goes

Saturday, August 06, 2022

Our weekly review of California new weekly claims for unemployment insurance continues to find no sign of recession - at least using this particular indicator of the labor market. We remain at pre-pandemic levels. At the national level, the latest report shows record low unemployment and a jump in payroll employment. So, there remains a lot of contradictory information on the economy. There are regular reports of tech firms laying off folks - but those folks are not causing an upward blip in the new claims data. The fact that we had two quarters of negative real GDP growth nationally should be a drag on the labor market - but it doesn't seem to have had that effect. Labor shortage reports continue, and - as we noted last week - it may be that employers are in effect "laying off" vacancies rather than real people, net.

As always, the latest new claims data are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.