That rise can be broken down into a gain of 6.3%from January 1 until election day and then a 4.9%gain during the post-election rally. For the year (with one trading day left as of this writing), the S&P500 index is up 11.5%, an excellent performance. While not official government economic data, the stock market does still provide economic data that measures both the current health and the expected future prospects for American businesses. The budget deficit was not that large over the last twelve months, but the government borrowed extra to catch up after the last debt ceiling showdown and seems to have borrowed extra in advance of another possible debt ceiling standoff looming for early in 2017. Treasury whose monthly statements show that the national debt will break $20 trillion before the end of 2016 after rising by $1.12 trillion dollars between November 2015 and November 2016. This is also probably a good sign as it implies that they can afford not to work full-time, perhaps because a spouse got a big enough raise to allow them to work part-time.īad economic news was delivered to us by the U.S. Further, people who work part-time for non-economic reasons, meaning those who choose to work part-time for personal reasons, rose by 990,000. People who work part-time for economic reasons, meaning that they want to work full-time but their employer doesn’t need them to, fell by 449,000, a good sign for the economy. The average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory personnel (the standard proxy for blue collar workers) rose by only $0.50 per hour, or 2.5%, over those same twelve months, slightly better than the inflation rate of 1.7% over the year but nothing to write home about. Altogether, these changes resulted in a drop in the unemployment rate from 5.0 to 4.6%.įurther evidence of the mixed health of the labor market are found in data on wages and part-time workers. Yet, thanks to new people entering the labor force every month, those gains in employment led to a much smaller drop in unemployment of only 507,000, while the number of people not in the labor force rose by 682,000. From November 2015 to November 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly Employment Situation reports tell us that total non-farm employment rose by 2,277,000, an average of 190,000 per month. Such weak economic growth didn’t do much to help the labor market, although it performed better in some ways than it had been during the first six years of the recovery. Unfortunately, that was offset by a decline in real gross private investment of 2.7% from the third quarter of 2015 to third quarter of 2016. That is a poor performance, especially given that consumer spending grew by 2.5% from November 2015 to November 2016. Real GDP grew by 1.6% from the third quarter of 2015 through the third quarter of 2016 (the latest reading we have).
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