Latest news with #NewCenturyAdvisors
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
What to expect from Friday's jobs report
The government's May jobs report, slated for release at 8:30 a.m. ET Friday, could reveal the first signs of the impact on American workers of President Donald Trump's harsh on-again, off-again tariff policy. The consensus forecast is for the US economy to have added 130,000 jobs, slowing from a stronger-than-expected 177,000 gain in April, and for the unemployment rate to hold at 4.2% for the third consecutive month, according to FactSet estimates. 'The labor market is good, but it's not exceptional, and we're in the process of putting some real strain on the economy,' Claudia Sahm, New Century Advisors chief economist, told CNN in an interview. A case in point: Last June, after almost a full year on the job hunt, Jordan Williams landed a role at a high-growth, United Kingdom-based outdoor apparel brand that was looking to build out its US operations. Passenger Clothing was well positioned for expansion: The company landed orders with REI, Scheels and others; and Williams, a Portland, Oregon-based outdoor industry veteran, was excited for the ride. Until April. 'Upon 'Liberation Day,'' Williams said, nodding to the moniker Trump assigned to his blowout tariff announcement on April 2, 'I was liberated from employment.' Overnight, the US went from being Passenger's biggest potential growth driver to its biggest existential threat. For every $1 million of recycled fabrics, organic clothing and other products that landed in the US from countries such as India and China, Passenger was responsible for an additional $500,000 of duties, the company said in a mid-April statement announcing the pause of its US operations. Williams officially lost his job on April 11. Economists have warned that early layoffs like Williams' could be the first signs of labor market fallout from Trump's steep (and shifting) tariffs, which have ramped up uncertainty testing the nimbleness of businesses of all sizes. The Labor Department's weekly jobless claims report has shown higher numbers of first-time claims last month as well as people who have remained on unemployment for multiple weeks. Last week, first-time claims rose more than expected and totaled an estimated 247,000 filings, marking the highest weekly tally since October 2024, according to Department of Labor data released Thursday. Continuing claims, which are filed by people who have received unemployment insurance for at least a week or more, continue to bump up against a three-and-a-half-year high. 'This is a market where there are stops and starts, and there are pullbacks in hiring,' Nela Richardson, chief economist at payroll giant ADP, said Wednesday. 'With establishments, especially small establishments, when there's a lot of uncertainty — it doesn't mean that the demand isn't there but the timing may be off — firms would rather wait and see than hire aggressively.' The hiring rate, the number of hires as a percentage of total employment, ticked higher in April to 3.5%, but remains below pre-pandemic levels, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released earlier this week. And by ADP's count (which doesn't always correlate with the official jobs report) hiring dropped off precipitously in April and May, when the private sector gained 60,000 and 37,000 jobs, respectively. 'The weak numbers we're seeing now does not point to a labor market that's collapsing, but there is hiring hesitancy,' Richardson said Wednesday. 'It's like driving through fog for some of our firms here,' she added. Though the ripple effects from various Trump policies could take longer to show up in the data, the federal workforce reductions have already started appearing. The federal government posted job losses for three consecutive months, dropping 13,000 jobs in February, 4,000 in March and 9,000 in April, BLS data shows. More losses could be spread over many months to come: Not all federal workers were laid off immediately, and other actions are being challenged in court. Through May, announced job cuts are running significantly higher than in recent years; however, the lion's share of the cutbacks have come from the federal government. Department of Government Efficiency-related cost-cutting and its downstream effects have led to more than 294,000 announced job cuts, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas data released Thursday. Another 131,257 announced cuts have been attributed to 'market/economic conditions,' while 2,097 have been directly tied to tariffs. 'Tariffs, funding cuts, consumer spending, and overall economic pessimism are putting intense pressure on companies' workforces,' Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of the outplacement and coaching firm, said in a statement. 'Companies are spending less, slowing hiring, and sending layoff notices.' DOGE's actions and economic uncertainty have driven job cut announcements significantly higher than last year: Through the first five months of the year, employers have announced 696,309 job cuts, an 80% increase from the comparable year-ago period, according to the Challenger report. It's also the third-highest total for a January-through-May period (behind the pandemic in 2020 and the Great Recession fallout in 2009) since Challenger started tracking employers' layoff intentions in 1993. In May, employers announced 93,816 job cuts, a decrease of 12% from April. The recent surge in layoff announcements could indicate that the labor market may see a further softening in the months to come (given the timing of the actions, severance and other effects); however, as it stands now, layoffs aren't mounting. Also, jobless claims (a proxy for layoffs) and the rate of layoffs and discharges remain below pre-pandemic levels, Labor Department data shows. Still, the impacts from tariffs might very well by a slow burn, Sahm said. 'We are still early days,' she said.
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
U.S. hiring likely slowed to 130,000 new jobs last month amid uncertainty over Trump's policies
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up For the most part, though, any damage has yet to show up in the government's economic data. Advertisement The U.S. economy and job market have proven surprisingly resilient in recent years. When the inflation fighters at the Federal Reserve raised their benchmark interest rate 11 times in 2022 and 2023, the higher borrowing costs were widely expected to tip the United States into a recession. Instead, the economy kept growing and employers kept hiring. But former Fed economist Claudia Sahm warns that the job market of 2025 isn't nearly as durable as the two or three years ago when immigrants were pouring into the U.S. job market and employers were posting record job openings. Advertisement 'Any signs of weakness in the data this week would stoke fears of a recession again,' Sahm, now chief economist at New Century Advisors, wrote in a Substack post this week. 'It's too soon to see the full effects of tariffs, DOGE, or other policies on the labor market; softening now would suggest less resilience to those later effects, raising the odds of a recession.'' Recent economic reports have sent mixed signals. The Labor Department reported Tuesday that U.S. job openings rose unexpectedly to 7.4 million in April — seemingly a good sign. But the same report showed that layoffs ticked up and the number of Americans quitting their jobs fell, a sign they were less confident they could find something better elsewhere. Surveys by the Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing managers, found that both American manufacturing and services businesses were contracting last month. And the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week to the highest level in eight months. Jobless claims — a proxy for layoffs — still remain low by historical standards, suggesting that employers are reluctant to cut staff despite uncertainty over Trump's policies. They likely remember how hard it was to bring people back from the massive but short-lived layoffs of the 2020 COVID-19 recession as the U.S. economy bounced back with unexpected strength. Still, the job market has clearly decelerated. So far this year, American employers have added an average 144,000 jobs a month. That is down from 168,000 last year, 216,000 in 2023, 380,000 in 2022 and a record 603,000 in 2021 in the rebound from COVID-19 layoffs. Advertisement Trump's tariffs — and the erratic way he rolls them out, suspends them and conjures up new ones — have already buffeted the economy. America's gross domestic product — the nation's output of goods and services — fell at a 0.2 percent annual pace from January through March this year. A surge of imports shaved 5 percentage points off growth during the first quarter as companies rushed to bring in foreign products ahead of Trump's tariffs. Imports plunged by a record 16 percent in April as Trump's levies took effect. The drop in foreign goods could mean fewer jobs at the warehouses that store them and the trucking companies that haul them around, wrote Michael Madowitz, an economist at the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute.
CNBC
07-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
The Fed will have to get back in the business of forecasting, says New Century's Claudia Sahm
Claudia Sahm, New Century Advisors chief economist, joins 'Power Lunch' to discuss the hawkish tone of the Fed following its decision to leave rates unchanged.
Bloomberg
02-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Bloomberg Surveillance: April Jobs
Watch Tom and Paul LIVE every day on YouTube: Bloomberg Surveillance hosted by Tom Keene & Paul Sweeney May 2nd, 2025 Featuring: 1) Claudia Sahm, Chief Economist at New Century Advisors, Sarah Wolfe, Senior Economist at Morgan Stanley, Sarah Hunt, Chief Markets Strategist at Alpine Woods Capital Investors, and Kristina Campmany, Senior Portfolio Manager at Invesco, react to the April jobs figures. The S&P 500 has notched eight consecutive days of gains, its longest run since August, amid increased optimism that trade tensions are waning, but many strategists feel a market bull run will be driven by strong economic data. 2) Gene Seroka, CEO of the Port of LA, joins for a discussion on how tariffs on China are affecting port traffic and what it could mean for the US economy. In March, Seroka predicted a possible 10% volume decline in the second half of this year due to substantial inventory and tariff uncertainty. Port data continues to be of interest to economists and market watchers. 3) Anurag Rana, Senior Tech Analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, wraps big tech earnings. Tech earnings and expectations of trade deals drove optimism in the markets, with investors awaiting the US jobs report on Friday, the last significant data release this week. 4) Adam Posen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, talks about his Foreign Affairs piece on why trade wars are easy to lose. Still, market sentiment has remained upbeat due to reports of the US reaching out to China for tariff talks, causing the dollar index to climb and Treasury yields to rise. 5) Constance Hunter, Chief Economist at EIU, brings us into the market open and discusses whether the US has stepped too far into the trade war and whether a recession is inevitable. While Wall Street's risk appetite has increased due to strong tech earnings - causing the S&P 500 to rise for eight consecutive days - it's unclear where trade deals with China and other partners will end up.
Business Insider
02-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The US added more jobs than expected in April, while unemployment held steady
The US added 177,000 jobs in April, surpassing the forecast, and unemployment remained at 4.2%. Economists expected a gain of 138,000 jobs and for unemployment to hold steady. Unemployment has been at least 4% since May 2024. This follows real gross domestic product shrinking for the first time in three years, sparking fears of a recession. However, some economists think this could be avoided. "We're on a path toward a recession, but it is clear what can get us off that path, and that would be less aggressive policies," Claudia Sahm, chief economist at New Century Advisors, told Business Insider. There are other warning signs beyond the drop in real US GDP. KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk recently told BI that the "deterioration in job security we are seeing is particularly worrisome" and that the "drop in consumer attitudes is in recession territory." President Donald Trump announced tariffs on April 2, including higher ones than the 10% base on individual countries. While tariffs could result in some job losses, Trump announced on April 9 a 90-day pause on many of the tariffs announced earlier that month. "This data is too soon to show the full impacts of the tariffs," Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, told BI. It could be a long time before those impacts appear. "Even in the optimistic scenario in which tariffs have the effect of bringing production of some goods back to America, those gains are likely years away," Kevin Rinz, senior fellow and research advisor at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, said. "Businesses will face increased costs of imported inputs and decisions about how those costs will affect their operations much more quickly." However, new tariffs aren't the only policy from the Trump administration that will likely affect the job market. "Large cuts to the federal workforce and the cancellations of many government contracts will also be a drag on payroll growth in coming months while tighter immigration flows will weigh on labor supply dynamics, further constraining job growth," Lydia Boussour, senior economist at EY, said. The next scheduled Federal Open Market Committee meeting, where members will decide what to do with interest rates, is less than a week away. CME FedWatch, which has the chances of rate moves based on market trades, shows a strong probability the Fed will hold rates steady again.
