15 Sep 2025

The Labor Market is Cooling

The jobs market is cooling down. The unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent. In the pandemic, the unemployment rate peaked at 14.8 percent, but fell to 3.4 percent in April 2023. While the modest tick up from 3.4 to 4.3 percent isn’t great, some of the recent payroll data hasn’t met expectations either. The most recent monthly reading showed that just 22k jobs were created, less than expectations. Worse… Read More

By David Ott Tags: , , , ,
11 Dec 2023

Visualizing the Labor Landscape

Probably not surprisingly, I follow the major economic data releases, but I often look at charts because I find the charts provide useful context about the new information. Take the nonfarm payrolls release last Friday. Everyone seems pretty excited about the data because it beat expectations and suggests that the economy is holding up reasonably well despite much higher interest rates. The chart below shows the monthly nonfarm payrolls for… Read More

By David Ott Tags: , , , ,