A slow-moving train wreck. That’s how one Seeking Alpha writer sizes up the July jobs report before it even lands. Not a crash. A grind. The kind of thing you watch coming for a while and can’t quite step out of the way of.
The read: hiring keeps cooling, the headline number gets propped up by a shrinking pool of people actually looking for work, and the cracks show up in the details long before they show up in the top line. So the print can look fine and still be a mess underneath. You know how it goes. The number nods, the guts don’t.
A cooling job market shows up as a job that takes six months to land instead of six weeks, and as a raise that comes in at 3% instead of 5%. If you’re sitting in a decent job right now, the move is to stay put and stack cash, not to go chasing a better title into a hiring freeze. Watch the revisions, not the headline number: the first print keeps getting marked down a month later, and that’s where the real trend hides.
The line for years was that a low unemployment rate meant you had leverage. Ask for the raise. Walk if they say no.
Then the hiring rate drops to levels last seen in 2013 while the headline number sits there looking fine, and the leverage turns out to be a ghost. Nobody’s firing you. Nobody’s hiring you either.
That’s the version of a soft landing nobody sells you on: the plane doesn’t crash, it just circles the runway until you run out of fuel.
Sources: seekingalpha.com
Would you like to save this?
We'll email this post to you, so you can come back to it later!