“Mad” Adam Carr today claims his jobs prize:
There was at least one alarming feature flowing from yesterday’s jobs number: The seeming inability of the nation, well the nation’s commentators, policymakers and economists, to celebrate what was in truth a fantastic outcome.
Let’s face the facts: The labour force figures are volatile, they have been since inception. There is nothing new in that. The skill is in determining the underlying trend within that volatility…
Yet even taking the lower-bound estimate of jobs growth from the ABS, the economy still created 63,000 jobs in August. This is still a very strong number that confirms a marked uptick in job creation this year. This is the awful truth about Australia’s jobs figures. They show an undeniable and strong acceleration.
…I explained in my piece, Australia’s coming jobs boom (August 5), why analysts should have been expecting a marked lift in jobs growth, maybe it wasn’t 121,000 in August. Then again, maybe it was.
Either way the biases and problems that impacted the survey this month are with us every month. With that in mind, current trends suggest the unemployment rate looks set to drop to 5.5 per cent by mid-next year, by which stage the economy will have created nearly half a million jobs.
I’ll take that bet. I’m not sure it was “fantastic” so much as” fantastical”. There’s certainly enough evidence to support the notion of a modest acceleration in jobs growth, just not enough yet to represent a labour market turn and falls in job seekers, especially given the mounting headwinds. Trend unemployment remains firmly up:
And let’s not forget the marked rise in labour underutilisation to near 16 year highs (since November 1998):
