Economix Blog: The Jobs Picture, as a New Report Awaits

Here is what we know about the economy, and in particular the jobs situation.

Employers are adding workers at a fairly sluggish clip, at a pace of about 146,000 jobs a month in the past three months. That’s probably more jobs than is necessary to keep the unemployment rate stable, given the natural growth in the size of the labor market. But it is fewer jobs than is necessary to pull the unemployment rate down from its elevated level of 7.8 percent very quickly.

Of late, consumers have been feeling better. Home prices have bottomed out in many markets, and are picking up in many others. The ranks of the jobless have shrunken, and millions of workers are seeing their wages increase, though not by much. Households have worked their way through the worst of the “deleveraging process.” The campaign seems to be having an effect, too: Democrats are feeling especially good.

But businesses are feeling worse. Executives are very concerned about the “fiscal cliff,” the huge tax increases and spending cuts looming in January. Manufacturing and exports, two of the bright spots in the recovery, have weakened of late. Overall growth in the American economy remains sluggish, and the major emerging-market countries that fueled the global rebound from the recession have cooled off.

Friday’s jobs report for October — the consensus forecast of economists, according to Bloomberg, is a net gain of 125,000 jobs — will be met with a deluge of political spin and hyperbolic analysis. Campaigns and their surrogates are eagerly awaiting the numbers, their narratives pre-written and their talking points sharp.

Surrogates for Mitt Romney’s campaign will argue that the current pace of jobs growth is too slow to bring us anywhere close to full employment any time soon. They will argue that the recovery is anemic in historical terms and that households are still feeling extraordinary pain. They will pick out especially weak numbers, in payrolls or employment in certain sectors.

Administration officials and advisers to President Obama’s campaign will argue that the economy is slowly but surely recovering from the worst recession since the Great Depression. They will argue that the economy is adding jobs steadily, with increases in private-sector payrolls for the past 31 months — probably 32 months, as of Friday’s report. They will pull out especially strong numbers, in payrolls or wages or employment in certain sectors.

But it is highly unlikely that Friday’s jobs report will do much to change our understanding of the current state of the broader economy — even if the numbers come in surprisingly high or surprisingly low, as they often do given the noisiness of the data.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/the-jobs-picture-as-a-new-report-awaits/?partner=rss&emc=rss