Amid much uncertainty, the job market is clearly softening
Amid much uncertainty, the job market is clearly softening
This is a big week for labor market data. Friday, when the national unemployment rate for February is released, is the biggest day. But we’re already starting to get a sense of what’s happening.
First-time unemployment claims inched up last week, and we’ll see Thursday whether that trend continues. On Wednesday, we learned from payroll-processing company ADP that hiring in the private sector slowed to its lowest pace since July and that small businesses cut jobs last month.
This week, Elizabeth Pancotti at the Groundwork Collaborative is not expecting a rosy jobs report.
Recent federal layoffs aren’t even the reason — it’s too soon for most of them to show up. Instead, she’s looking at all the data points coming out from ADP, unemployment claims, consumer sentiment surveys and more.
“They are coming together to tell a similar story, that there is a considerable risk for softening in the labor market,” Pancotti said.
Some softening has already been apparent. Michele Evermore at the National Academy of Social Insurance has seen it in one of the indicators she keeps tabs on: continued weekly unemployment claims.
“That means people who are unemployed and continue to file claims after they become unemployed,” Evermore said.
That number has been rising, which indicates it’s getting harder for people who were laid off to find jobs.
In part, this cooling was engineered by the Federal Reserve as it raised interest rates to bring inflation down and tried to steer the economy to a “soft landing.”
“I think we kind of stuck the landing, but I think that there’s been a lot of new uncertainty in the past month or two,” Evermore said.
Almost every economist I’ve talked to lately has used that word: “uncertainty.”
Guy Berger at the Burning Glass Institute said that’s because “uncertainty is disruptive, and it’s very high right now.”
For instance, are tariffs happening or not? Are billions in federal spending frozen or not?
“We don’t exactly know, even when policies are implemented, exactly how they’re going to be implemented,” Berger said.
And if you’re an employer, that’s a tough landscape to operate in. Ron Hetrick, senior labor economist at Lightcast, said for many businesses, it’s easier right now to just pause.
“If you were a company and you were saying, ‘I’m looking to expand, or I’m looking to hire,’ you would have investors in those companies saying, ‘Are you crazy?'” he said.
They’d probably say something like, “This is not the environment to do that in,” he added.
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