Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Civilian Employment - Quarterly Change

The following chart shows the quarterly change in the quarterly average of civilian employment.


Click to enlarge.

The blue parabolic trend line uses all of the data points.
The red parabolic trend line uses select low data points in red.

I say we just blame the trends on cold weather and problems in emerging markets. What's the worst that could happen?

Risk on, baby! Risk on!

This is not investment advice.

See Also:
Trend Line Disclaimer
Sarcasm Disclaimer

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

2 comments:

Rob Dawg said...

You make it sound like job growth lagging workforce growth is a bad thing.

Stagflationary Mark said...

Rob Dawg,

Well, yeah. I'm bad that way.

I didn't mean to make it sound bad overall though. Everyone knows we can safely ignore the household employment survey.

How accurate can it be to call households and ask if people are employed?

Much better to call existing businesses and ask if payrolls are being added *and* assume there are even more new businesses creating jobs that nobody even knows about yet! Who cares if the assumption model tends to break down at turning points?

Employment: Household vs Establishment Surveys

While the change in non-farm payrolls from the BLS's establishment survey usually gets the most attention, economists also like to look at the household survey which some say does a better job of picking up changes in employment at economic turning points.