Status Update, the US Economy, and US Employment
Thank you to those who have sent me detailed perspectives on how you see the Iraqi issue. Rest assured, I will respond to the issues you raised sometime this week. However, I have recently been spending most of my time on just this issue to the neglect of other subjects near and dear to my heart. So I have been using my "Solport time" today to work on my economic references. If you go to the reference section you will see that Solport has now doubled the number of items in the reference section...

The links provided in the economics section may prove useful for those who have an interest. However, I also plan on providing my own perspective on the economy with more detail being added over time. Today I made some charts available about US employment. I will update these on a monthly basis and discuss what I see in my blog.

Please understand that these charts are based on the US as a whole. Within the US economy, some industries will usually act contrary to the whole. For example, graduate school enrollment tends to increase during a recession. With that disclaimer out of the way, let me discuss the US employment situation.

I found the recent employment data interesting. Jobs in the manufacturing sectors are still slowly increasing. Manufacturers are still being cautious, but opportunities are increasing.

There was a surprisingly large drop in hiring for the non-manufacturing sector. However, I really want to see next month's data before drawing any conclusions. Unfortunately, the data I use for non-manufacturing jobs are seasonally adjusted before I get it (this is not true for the manufacturing data). Some economists attempt to smooth out their data by making adjustment for known patterns. For example, retailers generally hire lots of temporary help toward the end of the year to help with the Christmas shopping demand, and then release them in January when the shopping rush is over. So various economists (including those employed by the US government) make different adjustments to the data toward the end of the year and at the beginning of the year. I'm leery of this practice in general, but I'm especially skeptical this year. Retailers didn't hire lots of people this year because they were concerned (correctly) that many shoppers would cut back or shop on the internet. Thus, they didn't fire many people this January either. So the traditional seasonal adjustments used by many economists simply did not apply this time. But they were used anyway. So don't put much faith in any recent data that has been seasonally adjusted. I expect to have a clearer picture of the non-manufacturing employment situation next month.