... from yesterday's economic news. A perfect storm of personal and professional obligations brought about an unplanned break from blogging this past week. I still have no time to catch up properly, but here are a few quick pictures from the employment report and PCE update.
My first reaction was that the detail in the July employment report gave not much reason to be too distressed, despite what at first blush was a weak performance:
The categories of employment that have been the sources of strength so far this year -- professional and business services, leisure, and education -- held up just fine. We already know about the weakness in the construction sector, and flat growth in retail actually looks like an improvement. Manufacturing disappointed, but that followed gains of about the same magnitude in June -- and in manufacturing, something close to zero is the norm. All in all, no big surprises one way or the other, and nothing that really seems to warrant a revaluation of where things are heading.
No real surprise in the detail of the PCE inflation numbers either, but that is not good news. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the trimmed-mean measure of core PCE inflation rose at 3.1 percent pace in June, the same as in May. Both the 6-month and 12-month rates edged up, to 2.9 and 2.7 percent respectively. And the distribution of individual price changes (weighted by expenditure share) is just not what we want to see:
Nonetheless, it was the employment numbers that impressed.