AFMC - Weekly Market Pulse: Is The Economy Weaker Than It Appears?
2024-06-10 10:00:00 ET
Summary
- The employment report released last Friday offered contradictory views of the state of the economy.
- If we look at some of the other labor data available to us, like the JOLTS survey that was also released last week, a picture of a softening labor market comes into view.
- Large cap stocks and intermediate-term treasuries were the only asset classes that managed a gain last week, while small caps and commodities were both quite weak.
The employment report released last Friday offered contradictory views of the state of the economy. The Current Employment Survey (also called the payroll or establishment survey), which comes from a survey of 119,000 businesses, showed a gain of 272,000 jobs for the month of May, which is right in line with the monthly average since April of 2022. On the other hand, the unemployment rate rose to 4%, up from 3.9% last month and 3.4% in January of 2023, the low for this cycle. If we’ve been adding 250k jobs per month since then, why is the unemployment rate rising? That isn’t as hard as it sounds since there is a numerator and a denominator in that equation, but it is unusual....
Weekly Market Pulse: Is The Economy Weaker Than It Appears?