00:00Well, John, it looks like we have our last clue before the payrolls report tomorrow, 208,000 jobs for unemployment claims filings.
00:09That's up from 199 was the initial report that's been revised up to 200,000 for the prior week.
00:16Now, remember, these are pretty low numbers, but we also had the last two weeks be holiday weeks.
00:21So we could see a jump up in the weeks after that.
00:24This does come after the Challenger job cuts this morning, released earlier, early than as expected by Challenger, down 8.3 percent,
00:33basically halving the number of job cut announcements in December and the lowest since July of last year.
00:40So it does look like the labor market is just kind of hanging in there at this point.
00:45We also get the trade balance, negative 29.4 billion.
00:49That's a shockingly low number.
00:51The forecast was for 58.7, and that should do some good in terms of pushing up the revised third quarter growth numbers when we get them.
01:04Exports were up 2.6 percent, imports down 3.2 percent.
01:09There's the reason we are not importing anything.
01:12A lot of imports going sideways because of the tariffs, no doubt.
01:16And finally, we get productivity, the first read on productivity for the third quarter, 4.9 percent, just a tick lower than anticipated.
01:25And it is up from 3.3 percent in the second quarter.
01:29Unit labor costs fall by almost 2 percent, 1.9 percent.
01:33They were up 1 percent in the second quarter.
01:36And this is important because if companies can get this kind of productivity, they don't necessarily need to hire.
01:41Remember, we had very strong growth in the most recent quarter, and it is a result of not adding a lot of people, but adding a lot of some sort of capital for productivity.
01:53And if that continues, then maybe we see companies still holding off on hiring while they wait to see what the Trump economic policies are going to be.
02:03Well, Mike, let's talk about the policy.
02:04Now, the following question highly dependent on the president's objective.
02:07But ultimately, is his policy working?
02:11Well, that depends on what his policy actually is.
02:16And I am not really joking about that.
02:19I'm trying to be serious in the sense that if the president's goal is to bring down the trade deficit, he's done that.
02:26It's the smallest since 2016.
02:29But that's basically irrelevant to the overall economy and isn't really going to make anybody's lives a little better.
02:36The productivity numbers are good.
02:38That's probably from AI, so I don't know that that has a lot to do with him.
02:42And the jobless numbers, the payroll numbers that we're seeing, are more a result of his policies and uncertainty about what's going to happen going forward as companies wait for further information.
02:54So it doesn't look like he's making a lot of progress, although if productivity were to continue at these levels, we would see it be disinflationary, and that might get him back on the affordability track.
Be the first to comment