12/27 Christmas Eve Special
A labor market update from Don and a Merry Christmas Eve to All.
Happy Xmas Eve all -
Hope you all have had a great start to the long holiday weekend.
Keeping this note very short as our contributor team has the week off & we’re pretty quiet on data for the remainder of the year. My report will focus on a quick update on our jobs cut tracker, our interactive leading employment index, and an update on the continuing claims situation.
Our latest data for December job cuts is 32,421 job cuts. Job cuts this month have occurred in a variety of sectors within the private sector and have also included notable public sector cuts like the Washington Metro Transit Authority which announced substantial cuts due to poor ridership revenue.
Total job cuts have slowed dramatically since the peak in October when the large Citibank job cuts were announced - and I think it’s reasonable to expect a pickup in job cuts sometime before the Q1 earnings bonanza that will give us eyes and ears into holiday sale performances from all the major players. Here’s the trend in job cuts since we began tracking this series on our website:
Our Leading Employment Index saw a slight decrease to 98.79421 (100=month 1 from inversion of the 10 year / 3 month curve) signalling contraction of our 7 basket weighted average leading cyclical employment sectors. This reading was skewed by negative revisions made for the September and October - the majority of the basket actually saw expansion in total employment in November.
The cyclical reading continues to track closely to the path in 2007 even though the 10y3m spread remains deeply inverted. Continuing claims continue to remain elevated well off of the lows - although we saw a decrease week over week. Come Spring, seasonality will begin working against this elevated number as the BLS attempts to guess where true claims are actually at. Historically Q1 of this year by all measures will be the period to watch.
We hope you all have a fantastic Christmas and hope to see you on MacroEdge.net in 2024. We are looking forward to sharing our 2024 vision in next week's report.
Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Your friend,
Don