Employment Chart Roundup
By Barry Ritholtz - March 6th, 2010, 11:30AM
Once again, we’ve scoured the intertubes looking for the most interesting, unusual and informative charts about the Employment Situation, to use the BLS vernacular.
Here are 10 of the best of what we found (as always, click for larger charts):
>
Labor Utilization: U3 versus U6 Unemployment
Courtesy of EconomPic
~~~
Monthly Change in Payroll Employment
(1000s)
courtesy of Briefing.com
~~~
Unit Labor Cost Relative to Inflation
(82% correlation)
Courtesy of Haver Analytics (David Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff)
~~~
Unemployment Rate by Educational Attainment
courtesy of Chart of the Day
~~~
Temporary Help Hiring
Courtesy of Bruce Steinberg.net
~~~
Some Sectors Show Signs of Life
Courtesy of EconomPic
~~~
Comparing Post WW2 Recessions
Courtesy of CalculatedRisk
~~~
NFIB Survey Data:
Courtesy of NFIB
~~~
Breakdown of Unemployed by Race, Gender
(Interactive WSJ chart)
courtesy of WSJ
~~~
Payroll Employment and Hiring Plans
Courtesy of BCA
Tweet
Facebook
Reddit
Digg this!
March 6th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Strange presentation of U3 & U6. It’s too easy to miss that the two scales have a different baseline.
March 6th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
more employment charts
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/unemployment-97-february-2010
March 6th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
The employment situation can’t be that bad – the stock market keeps going up.
March 6th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
IMO The calculated risk chart says it all. I think one could write several 500 page volumes based on that chart. It contains a history of the last 60 years.
March 6th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Great work Barry assembling these diverse views. this is a real service. No single view is enough to capture the unfolding “employment situation”
What would make it even better would be for each chart to be accompanied with a mini-story with the gist of the message the chart creator was aiming to deliver by creating that particular graph instead of all the other possible graphs one might have chosen to create with the same data.
The chart viewers could still come to their own conclusions about the “meaning” of the chart, but at least they wouldn’t have to guess at the creator’s intentions.
March 6th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
I believe this “good” job news are just a smear effect of high government subsidies, “quantitative easing” which both bloat GDP and other indicators plus a similar effect as in the Great Depression where people begin to think the worst may be over and gingerly start investing again. Plus low warehouse stocks sometimes necessitate new production etc. Little do they yet take into account that all this will probably come to an abrupt halt when the second, and bigger, wave of mortgage defaults begins to hit 2010 and right through the whole of 2011!
March 7th, 2010 at 8:55 am
[...] An employment chart round-up. (Big Picture) [...]
March 7th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Along with the comaprison chart from Calculated Risk, I find the unit labor cost relative to inflation the scariest chart in this roundup. I understand that early recovery “productivity” gains can increase this gap, but this appears to be something entirely different. I guess if we’re lucky it’s just stagflation; if we’re not it augurs a deflationary spiral. Feeling Japanese yet?