{"id":2806,"date":"2009-06-09T07:48:06","date_gmt":"2009-06-09T07:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2806"},"modified":"2025-03-27T15:48:50","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T15:48:50","slug":"us-jobs-news-improving-at-margin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2806","title":{"rendered":"US jobs news improving at margin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Is the US labour market improving, or at least deteriorating less rapidly? Employees on non-farm payrolls dropped by 345,000 in May &ndash; lower than expected and down from an average of 612,000 over the prior three months. An alternative payrolls measure derived from the household survey, however, fell by 833,000, contributing to a further rise in the unemployment rate to 9.4%, a 26-year high.<\/p>\n<p>The jury is out but two other indicators support the more hopeful message from the &#8220;official&#8221; payrolls series. First, a smoothed measure of employment taxes withheld at source (equivalent to UK PAYE) has edged higher since February &ndash; see first chart. Unsurprisingly, withheld taxes are a good coincident indicator of labour incomes and successfully delineated the last recession. (The numbers have been adjusted to take account of a cut in the withheld tax rate from April.)<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, the&nbsp;outplacement firm Challenger, Gray &amp; Christmas Inc&#8217;s monthly tally of job-cut announcements has fallen steadily from a peak of 234,000 (seasonally adjusted) in January, reaching 111,000 in May &ndash; the lowest since September. The series correlates with weekly initial unemployment claims and suggests that claims will extend their recent small decline &ndash; second chart. This, in turn, would be consistent with an imminent peak in the unemployment rate.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"full-image-block ssNonEditable\"><span><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/storage\/US-daily-withheld-tax-090609.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1244534504645\" alt=\"\" \/><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"full-image-block ssNonEditable\"><span><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/storage\/US-job-claims-090609.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1244534520567\" alt=\"\" \/><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is the US labour market improving, or at least deteriorating less rapidly? Employees on non-farm payrolls dropped by 345,000 in May &ndash; lower than expected and down from an average of 612,000 over the prior three months. An alternative payrolls measure derived from the household survey, however, fell by 833,000, contributing to a further rise [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money-moves-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5115,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2806\/revisions\/5115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}