Categories
Articles

Employment Trends May Be Accelerating

“Davidson” submits:

The Establishment Survey rises by 257,000 and the Household by 759,000. All good! There were positive revisions to the Establishment Survey which has been the pattern for some time. Finally, the chatter in the media seems to be taking these  reports as a positive rather than locating something to interpret as ‘a sign of weakness’. Light Vehicle sales were reported earlier in the week with a SARR(Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate) of 16.7mil (subject to revision). These were also treated as an overall surprise. See the chart below.

Screen Shot 2015-02-06 at 10.10.10 AM

While it is too early to call, the trend in the Household Survey(my preferred employment measure) appears to show signs of acceleration. There have been hints in Job Opening and Help Wanted Online data in the past 6mo that we could be seeing an acceleration in employment, but it takes more than a couple of reports to actually have some confidence that this is so. Just the same, the economic trends in place since early 2009 continue to be affirmed. All remains good!

 

This is the first jobs report since early 2009 in which pundits and media seem to actually like without finding some negative they could use to dismiss any of the positives. I think this is significant.

 

1)      I continue to recommend Equities over Fixed Income.

2)      I continue to expect another 5yrs of economic expansion(based on traditional housing cycle economic impact).

3)      I think our recent repositioning into greater Intl LgCap and NatResource exposures is already showing benefit.