What to Watch for in the November US Jobs Report

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Transcript

00:00What are we expecting? I pointed out the whisper number is quite low, but the survey is a little

00:05bit higher. And neither one of them really has a lot of grounding in fact at this point,

00:09because we don't even have the October numbers, which we'll get part of today. And that's part

00:13of the problem is we get two months wrapped into one and I could bore the pants off you and talk

00:17about the statistical problems with trying to put this together. But let's just say the Labor

00:22Department has already suggested that the error bans are going to be wide around these numbers,

00:27wider than usual. It's going to be hard to know exactly what they are telling us. We will get

00:33the average, we will get the payrolls numbers for October and November, but we don't really know

00:41what October is going to give us because we don't know how much data they got. We'll get average

00:46hourly earnings, but we're going to only get the unemployment rate for November. And the

00:51unemployment rate is expected to tick up, but that's based on what? We don't know. It went up

00:57in September, but what happened in October, there's no data. So we don't have an idea.

01:02Same story with average hourly earnings and the same story with overall payrolls and whisper

01:08numbers and everything like that. It's just going to take a little while to figure all this out.

01:13So, you know, historically, four and a half percent is the estimate for the unemployment rate. And

01:20that's a fairly low number historically, although it's getting to a lot for, you know, kids today.

01:27At what point does the Fed really start to worry or what point do policymakers really start to worry

01:32about U.S. unemployment? Well, that's a good question because they had been saying into the

01:37summer that they would start worrying if we moved quickly to four and a half percent. Now we've moved

01:42to four and a half percent if these numbers are correct, but how quickly has it been? And why did

01:49we? Because more people came into the labor force or because fewer people got jobs? Those are the

01:54questions that are not answered. And they haven't really given us an answer in terms of a number,

01:59but they have said that what they're worried about is that unemployment could start accelerating.

02:05And that's why they have been cutting rates. So we'll get some idea of where we are,

02:10but we don't know where we're going.