Some economics pundits needlessly bang their heads against the wall when it comes to the art/science of digesting the numbers. Today’s example: the Labor Department’s employment report for July. Although economists focus on the so-called establishment survey for assessing nonfarm payrolls, the government also publishes an alternative measure of the labor force via what’s labeled as the household survey. These are two different methodologies for quantifying changes in the labor force that, not surprisingly, don’t always agree on a month-to-month basis—July’s statistical conflict was unusually wide. The divergence creates a fair amount of confusion, but it shouldn’t. You can find a clearer view of the trend in the year-over-year changes, which is an antidote of sorts for the monthly noise.
Daily Archives: August 3, 2012
Private Payrolls Rebound In July
Nonfarm private payrolls rose 172,000 last month on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reports. That’s substantially higher than the roughly 100,000 gain predicted by the consensus forecast among economists. Today’s number is also a respectable improvement over June’s revised increase of 73,000. The better-than-expected result for July isn’t a complete surprise, however, given the hints in Wednesday’s ADP Employment Report. Surprising or not, today’s employment report offers another data point for arguing that the economy isn’t falling off a cliff into a new recession.