For all of that left-wing press rabble babble about the Trumpian economy, also known as the great American economy, nearly all of the numbers coming in this spring are showing strength and resilience. Yes there is a war going on, yes gasoline and other energy prices have jumped up because of that war, but it’s very hard to find negative consequences from the Iran energy war shock.
Of course that’s all the lefty press ever writes about, but the lefties are gonna be very disappointed that there is no recession in sight. Indeed, the Atlanta Fed GDPNow is predicting 3.7 percent annual growth in the second quarter. And today’s jobs number is yet another example of a strong economy. It beat expectations by twice as much.
Private sector pay rolls jumped 123,000, following last month’s gain of 190,000. Those are big numbers. The unemployment rate is still at 4.3 percent. That’s virtually a full employment number.
We don’t need hundreds of thousands of jobs each month anymore because the borders are closed. And the so-called break even rate of job growth could be something near zero. Indeed, a good 3 million illegal immigrants have left the United States either through self-deportation or criminal deportation. Anyway, while President Trump has reduced the federal workforce by 345K, the private workforce has moved ahead by nearly that much in just the last 2 months.
Weekly unemployment claims continue at rock bottom. And interestingly it’s the nonsupervisory production workers who have done the best over the past year. Their hourly earnings have increased 3.7 percent while their hours worked have jumped 1 percent. Now what economists call the wage-income proxy, which adds earnings to hours worked, is now showing a 4.7 percent increase. The blue-collar folks are doing better than the white-collar folks.
And the 4.7 percent total wage income gain is still way better than the roughly 3 percent inflation rate favored by the Federal Reserve. And even much more ahead of the 2.7 percent median consumer price index from the Cleveland Fed. Or the 2.4 percent trimmed mean from the Dallas Fed.
Nobody’s thrilled about the energy shock, including myself, but I still believe it will be temporary. And I still believe it’s a small price to pay to the gruesome and barbaric Iranian regime, probably the worst government we’ve seen since the Nazis of a hundred years ago to get rid of all of them.
Anyway, the Institute for Supply Management’s services and manufacturing indexes are strong. Non-farm productivity over the past year is up a fantastic 2.9 percent. And unit labor costs are up only 1.2 percent, which may be the best underlying inflation measure of all. And that feeds into the best profits performance for American business in at least 20 years. Remember profits are the mothers’ milk of stocks. And that leads to the record breaking stock markets.
In Trumpian America, both workforce labor and investment capital are both doing very well. That’s what you get from tax cuts, deregulation and “drill, baby, drill,” and reciprocal fair trade. All of it.
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