Deficit Spending & Employment Archives - Page 13 of 15

June 1, 2017

ISM May 2017 Report

After a setback in April, activity in the manufacturing sector is again expanding:

MANUFACTURING AT A GLANCE May 2017
Index	Series Index May	Series Index Apr	Percentage Point Change	Direction	Rate of Change	Trend* (Months)
PMI^®	54.9	54.8	+0.1	Growing	Faster	9
New Orders	59.5	57.5	+2.0	Growing	Faster	9
Production	57.1	58.6	-1.5	Growing	Slower	9
Employment	53.5	52.0	+1.5	Growing	Faster	8
Supplier Deliveries	53.1	55.1	-2.0	Slowing	Slower	13
Inventories	51.5	51.0	+0.5	Growing	Faster	2
Customers’ Inventories	49.5	45.5	+4.0	Too Low	Slower	8
Prices	60.5	68.5	-8.0	Increasing	Slower	15
Backlog of Orders	55.0	57.0	-2.0	Growing	Slower	4
New Export Orders	57.5	59.5	-2.0	Growing	Slower	15
Imports	53.5	55.5	-2.0	Growing	Slower	4

OVERALL ECONOMY				Growing	Faster	96
Manufacturing Sector				Growing	Faster	9

Manufacturing ISM^® Report On Business^® data is seasonally adjusted for the New Orders, Production, Employment and Supplier Deliveries Indexes.

*Number of months moving in current direction.

Notable comments from respondents:

“Business conditions are steady, and with competition increasing, it’s making negotiations even more intense to reduce costs.” (Machinery)
“Business is booming, and getting direct employees is increasingly difficult.” (Fabricated Metal Products)
“Difficult to find qualified labor for factory positions.” (Food, Beverage & Tobacco Products)

Read the full report at ISM May Report

May 22, 2017

Growth in total monthly hours worked has slowed to 1.3% for the 12 months to April 2017. In fact, growth has been pretty lean over the last 5 years, except for the period January 2015 to February 2016.

ABS: Hours Worked & GDP growth

High commodity prices in 2004 to 2008 and 2010 to 2011 coincide with periods of strong employment and GDP growth, as indicated on the chart above.

DJ-UBS Commodity Index

The current down-trend in commodity prices, depicted on the DJ-UBS Commodity Index above, and low growth in hours worked both point to anemic employment (and GDP) growth ahead.

April 9, 2017

Inflation surges

Inflation is rising, with CPI climbing steeply above the Fed’s 2% target. But core CPI excluding energy and food remains stable.

Consumer Price Index

Job gains were the lowest since May 2016.

Job Gains

But the unemployment rate fell to a low 4.5%.

Unemployment

Hourly wage rate growth has eased below 2.5%, suggesting that underlying inflationary pressures are contained.

Average Hourly Earnings Growth

The Fed is unlikely to accelerate its normalization of interest rates unless we see a surge in core inflation and/or hourly earnings growth.

April 6, 2017

Robots Take Over | Susanna Koelblin | LinkedIn

From Susanna Koelblin:

First large scale shoe robot factory unveiled: Adidas will use machines in Germany instead of humans in Asia to make shoes

Adidas, the German maker of sportswear, has announced it will start marketing its first series of shoes manufactured by robots in Germany from 2017. More than 20 years after Adidas ceased production activities in Germany and moved them to Asia, Adidas unveiled the group’s new prototype “Speedfactory” in Germany. As of this year, the factory will begin large-scale production. What’s more, Adidas will also open a second Speedfactory in the U.S. in 2017, followed by more in Western Europe. According to the company, the German and American plants will in the “mid-term” each scale up to producing half a million pair of shoes per year.

Does this pose a threat to Adidas’s traditional manufacturing base in China, Indonesia and Vietnam? After all, labor in the region is becoming less cheap these days, and manufacturers are increasingly turning to robots. The current model in the apparel industry is very much based on sourcing products from countries where consumers are typically not based. In the longer term Adidas could even produce the shirts of Germany’s national football team in its home country. The shoes made in Germany would sell at a similar price to those produced in Asia, where Adidas employs around one million workers. Arch-rival Nike is also developing its robot-operated factory.

This development in the shoe area is just the beginning and will be leveraged to the apparel industry as well….

Robot factories will not restore former employment levels, with operations run by a skeleton staff. And low employment leads to low consumption. But new factories will require intensive capital investment. This may portend increased demand for capital in the future. With current high debt levels threatening the stability of the financial system, equity investors may be in short supply.

Source: Robots Take Over – The Apparel Production | Susanna Koelblin | Pulse | LinkedIn

March 18, 2017

A huge hole in Trump’s promise to bring back US manufacturing jobs | Business Insider

By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa:

US manufacturing employment has been declining since a 1970 peak, a drop that accelerated after China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation but, tellingly, not after the US entered the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada in 1994.

….SoftWear’s business, along with so many others across the US, should remind Trump of a factor he has yet to acknowledge: the role of automation in reducing the number of manufacturing jobs available…..

That fits a nationwide pattern of manufacturing output hitting record highs in recent years, even as manufacturing employment continues its steady decline.

….Mark Muro, a senior fellow and the director of policy at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, wrote in MIT’s Technology Review. “No one should be under the illusion that millions of manufacturing jobs are coming back to America.”

Source: There is a huge hole in Trump’s promise to bring back US manufacturing jobs | Business Insider

March 10, 2017

Australia’s economic growth is slowing.

Employment and Participation rates are falling.

Australia Employment & Participation Rates

Wage rate growth is slowing.

Australia Wage Rates

Slowing wage rate growth and inflation confirm that the economy is faltering.

Australia Underlying Inflation

The RBA, with one eye on the housing bubble, has indicated its reluctance to cut rates further. Increased infrastructure spending by Federal and State governments seems the only viable alternative.

With the motor industry winding down and apartment construction headed for a cliff, this is becoming increasingly urgent.

March 10, 2017

Robust Job Growth, Solid Labor Market | WSJ

From WSJ:

The pace of job creation remained robust in February, with payrolls rising by a seasonally adjusted 235,000 new jobs, the Labor Department said.

Evidence of continued health in the U.S. labor market likely cleared the way for the Federal Reserve to raise short-term interest rates next week. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.7%, as both workforce participation and employment rose….

Source: Robust Job Growth, Higher Wages Show Solid Labor Market – WSJ

September 13, 2016

Rising debt—not a crisis, but a serious problem | Brookings

Testimony by Alice M. Rivlin, Senior Fellow – Economic Studies, Center for Health Policy, before the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress on September 8, 2016:

…..our national debt is high in relation to the size of our economy and will likely rise faster than the economy can grow over the next several decades if budget policies are not changed. Debt held by public is about 74 percent of GDP and likely to rise to about 87 percent in ten years and to keep rising after that.

This rising debt burden is a particularly hard problem for our political system to handle because it is not a crisis. Nothing terrible will happen if we take no action this year or next. Investors here and around the world will continue to lend us all the money we need at low interest rates with touching confidence that they are buying the safest securities money can buy. Rather, the prospect of a rising debt burden is a serious problem that demands sensible management beginning now and continuing for the foreseeable future.

What makes reducing the debt burden so challenging is that we need to tackle two aspects of the debt burden at the same time. We need policies that help grow the GDP faster and slow the growth of debt simultaneously. To grow faster we need a substantial sustained increase in public and private investment aimed at accelerating the growth of productivity and incomes in ways that benefit average workers and provide opportunities for those stuck in low wage jobs. At the same time we need to adjust our tax and entitlement programs to reverse the growth in the ratio of debt to GDP. Winning broad public understanding and support of basic elements of this agenda will require the leadership of the both parties to work together, which would be difficult even in a less polarized atmosphere. The big uncertainty is whether our deeply broken political system is still up to the challenge.

…..There are three necessary elements of a long-run debt reduction plan:

Putting the Social Security program on sustainable track for the long run with some combination higher revenues and reductions in benefits for higher earners.

Gradually adjusting Medicare and Medicaid so that federal health spending is not rising faster than the economy is growing….

Adjusting our complex, inefficient tax system so that we raise more revenue in a more progressive and growth-friendly way and encourage the shift from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources…..

Source: Rising debt—not a crisis, but a serious problem to be managed | Brookings Institution

August 13, 2016

Does Government Spending Create Jobs?

By William Dupor, Assistant Vice President and Economist

The most recent U.S. expansion, however lackluster, entered its eighth year in June.1 In anticipation of the possibility (or perhaps inevitability) of another recession, observers have remarked on how and whether countercyclical fiscal policy should be used to combat an economic downturn….

Gauging Effects through Military Spending
Research Analyst Rodrigo Guerrero and I took up the issue of the efficacy of government spending at increasing employment. We looked specifically at over 120 years of U.S. military spending, which provides a kind of “natural experiment” for our analysis.

Looking at government spending more generally suffers from the problem that the spending may be correlated with economic activity: The government may spend more during a recession (as with ARRA) or more during an expansion (when tax revenues are high). This might bias the results, which economists call “an endogeneity bias.”

Military spending, on the other hand, is likely to be determined primarily by international geopolitical factors rather than the nation’s business cycle.

….We used a similar methodology and found that military spending shocks had a small effect on civilian employment. Following a policy change that began when the unemployment rate was high, if government spending increased by 1 percent of GDP, then total employment increased by between 0 percent and 0.15 percent. Following a policy change that began when the unemployment rate was low, the effect on employment was even smaller.

In the event of another recession, policymakers have a number of stabilization tools at their disposal, including quantitative easing, negative interest rates and tax relief. The research discussed above suggests that one other device, namely countercyclical government spending, may not be very effective, even when the economy is slack.

I think the authors of this research come to the wrong conclusion. Instead they should have concluded that military spending is not very effective in creating jobs.

Military spending provides no lasting benefit to the economy in terms of tax revenue or saleable assets, leaving future taxpayers with public debt and no means of repayment. Other than an austerity budget which would risk another recession.

Whereas infrastructure projects can be selected on their ability to generate market-related returns on investment, providing revenue to service the public debt incurred…..and saleable assets that can be used to repay debt.

But there are two caveats.

First, project selection must not be a political decision. Else projects likely to win votes will be selected ahead of those that generate decent financial returns.

Second, the private sector must have skin in the game to ensure that #1 is adhered to. Also to reduce cost blowouts. Private companies are not immune to blowouts but government projects are in a league of their own.

The added benefit of infrastructure spending is the free lunch government gets from reduced unemployment benefits. Money they would have spent anyway is now put to a more productive use.

Source: Does Government Spending Create Jobs?

May 22, 2016

The Internet of Things: it’s arrived and it’s eyeing your job

From Malcolm Maiden:

The Internet of Things is “billions of connected devices from vending machines to mining equipment, aircraft engines and their componentry, agricultural sensors and cars,” [Andy] Penn said in his first keynote speech as Telstra CEO in July last year.

It both offers opportunities and poses threats. Penn mentioned in his first speech for example that a Committee for Economic Development of Australia report on Australia’s future workforce had estimated that almost 40 per cent of the jobs that exist in Australia had a moderate to high likelihood of disappearing in the next 10 to 15 years.

“Machine learning is the biggest driver of this because of its implications for the service industry,” he said. “In future, many traditional services type activities will be done by computers more quickly, more cheaply and more accurately.

“New jobs will be created by the Internet of Things, too of course. We just don’t know yet exactly where they will be…..”

Source: The Internet of Things: it’s arrived and it’s eyeing your job

Category: Deficit Spending & Employment