More than any employment number in recent memory, today’s is a total crapshoot.
Its going to be ugly, but that’s no surprise. The only suspense is whether its going to be mediocre (i.e., 150k lost jobs), bad (250), awful (350) or horrific (500+).
Bloomberg survey consensus was for 333k.
We lost 240,000 jobs in October. I was going to choose 275k as a middle of the road number, but that’s probably too optimistic.
We could easily see a 400k or worse.
Given all of the layoffs and utter lack of hiring going on, I am going to throw out 365k as my guess — 1000 job losses per day for a year — in one month.
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As always, remember that the trend is what matters — not any single monthly number. And for the past 24 months, the trend has been negative.
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