Still tight labor market New unemployment claims decreased last week to 229k as the labor market remains strong despite the other uncertainties across the economy. We reached a 53-year low of weekly unemployment claims in March (166k) and have been relatively consistent in the ~200k range ever since. Though there have been reports of job cuts in the tech and housing sectors, it doesn’t seem to have flowed through into the entire labor market. There are still 11.4m job openings, which is about 2 job openings for every unemployed person. Moral of the story: I’ve been trying to find any sort of giveback in the labor market to indicate bigger…

Here to stay Producer prices are a precursor to consumer prices (aka inflation) as producers typically experience those higher costs first, and then pass them onto their customers. We had seen producer prices (as measured by the PPI) increase due to supply chain issues well before we saw inflation really take off. Unfortunately for us, producer prices continued to increase in May by 0.8%, bringing the annual increase in prices to 10.8%, which is close to the 11.5% record we saw in March this year. Moral of the story: Inflation is not slowing down anytime soon. This level of inflation, persisting for a long time, is a world many of us…

Looking for early signs New unemployment claims came in at 229k last week, higher than the 210k number expected, and 27k higher than the prior week. This is the highest weekly unemployment number we’ve seen since January. The weekly numbers tend to be volatile and can be impacted by holiday weekends and the such. The trend in these numbers over a four-week period (to try and smooth out the weekly volatility) is still showing some of the strongest numbers since the 1970s. Moral of the story: One week does not make a trend in this economic metric BUT we’re hearing a lot of big tech companies talking about layoffs and…

Not rolling over In a surprising turn of events, the Institute for Supply Chain Management’s manufacturing index increased to 56.1 for May, compared to expectation for a decrease in the index. Anything above 50 indicates a growth environment, but we’ve been inching toward that 50 number over the last few months as conditions have gotten tougher for American manufacturers. Moral of the story: Manufacturing in the US managed to improve despite everything working against it. Supply chains still feel broken and, in some cases, it’s getting worse. But, the key takeaway for me is that fears seem overdone – while things are bound to slow a bit before they start…