Preston Mui

In our labor market recap for March 2023, I described the state of the labor market as “a goldilocks labor market, with strong employment, increasing labor supply, and sustainable levels of wage growth.” However, there is at least one cloud in an otherwise clear sky: the number of unemployed permanent

We reconstruct the White House’s core non-housing services wage index. We walk through the construction of this series, which is available for premium donors.

The data from the March labor market show continued labor market strength. As was true last month, almost all employment-based indicators show improvement from the previous month, even as the general trend of wage growth is downwards. The headline unemployment number fell from 3.6% to 3.5% (as we

There's a great deal of literature on the connection between tighter credit conditions, economic activity, hiring, and inflation. Very large body of literature. The question is, how significant will this credit tightening be and how sustainable it will be. Jerome Powell, March 22, 2023 FOMC Press Conference In

It has now been almost exactly one year since the Fed started raising interest rates to combat inflation. When they started raising rates, the unemployment rate was at 3.6%. In February, the unemployment rate was… also at 3.6%. Even construction employment, a notoriously interest rate sensitive sector, remains

At the Senate Banking Committee’s Humphrey Hawkins hearing on Tuesday, Senator Warren questioned Chair Powell about the implications of the Fed’s projections for unemployment, which call for an unemployment rate of 4.6% by year’s end, around an additional two million people without jobs. Powell was resistant