Must-Read: : This Job Market Slump Started a While Ago: “The Federal Reserve’s Labor Market Conditions Index… is a new measure… consolidates 19 different labor market indicators…
…The index has now declined for five straight months — its worst performance since the recession…. I first learned of its existence Monday when Erica Groshen, the Commissioner of the Bureau of the Labor Statistics, mentioned it at a conference for BLS data users in New York. It was a good reminder, as were a lot of the other presentations at the conference, that the headline jobs numbers that get the lion’s share of attention… aren’t always the best places to look for information…. One of the indicators included in the LMCI, for example, is employment in temporary help services, which tends to start rising and falling before overall employment does. Well, watch out: It looks like it may have peaked in December…. Though the signals coming from the U.S. labor market have been mostly negative for several months now, according to the LMCI, they’ll have to get much worse before it indicates that the economy is falling into a recession. Still, this is clearly more than just one off month.