Low Layoffs Are Not an Open Door
Hires and separations both ran at 5.1 million.
The wire framing on Thursday was that layoffs remain low. Claims for unemployment benefits fell to 196,000 in the week ending September 12, the Labor Department reported.
That was down 10,000 from the prior week. The four-week average settled at 203,250.
Payrolls had grown 162,000 in August, and the unemployment rate held at 4.1 percent. A low firing rate on top of steady job growth reads like a labor market in good working order.
That read watches one door. Claims count people losing jobs, and the series says nothing about anyone finding one.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the other door in its job openings and turnover survey. Hires ran at 5.1 million in July, and total separations ran at 5.1 million.
Both sat at a rate of 3.2 percent. The flow into work and the flow out of it matched each other.
Quits ran at 1.9 percent, and layoffs and discharges ran at 1.0 percent. Few of the employed are quitting, and few are being pushed out.
The claims number also covers a smaller group than the headline suggests. Continuing claims stood at 1,730,000 in the first week of September, against 7.0 million unemployed Americans in August.
That is roughly one unemployed person in four. The insured unemployment rate was 1.1 percent while the unemployment rate was 4.1 percent.
The gap has a mechanical cause. Most states stop regular benefits at 26 weeks.
Anyone jobless longer than that leaves the claims data whether or not they find work. In August, 1.9 million people had been jobless 27 weeks or more.
More Americans have been jobless past 26 weeks than are collecting benefits at all.
The truth about Venezuela
President Trump secured a deal to seize control over a colossal new source of oil.
According to reports, we’re talking about 65 billion barrels spread across 17 Venezuelan oil fields.
For comparison, the United States currently has roughly 46 billion barrels of proven domestic oil.
Combined, that would put Washington in control of around 7% of all proven reserves on the planet.
The media are treating this as a deal to lower gas prices, rebuild Venezuela and refill America’s depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Because I don’t believe this is just about oil.
It’s about the U.S. dollar.
The last time America reset its monetary system, in 1974, oil sat at the very heart of it.
A secret pact with Saudi Arabia created the petrodollar – and changed the financial destiny of an entire generation.
Over the next 50 years, America created, on average, more than a thousand new millionaires every day.
Yet millions of ordinary workers and savers – who were never told that the rules of money had changed – watched their wages fall behind and their savings steadily hollowed out.
Now, assuming the deal is accurate as reported, Trump has secured a 35% U.S. government stake in the company controlling these Venezuelan fields…
Guaranteed access to 20% of its oil at production cost, with first refusal on the remaining 80%…
And concessions lasting an entire century.
Perhaps most revealingly, the agreement is pushing Chinese operators out of strategic Venezuelan oil fields.
That’s because Venezuela isn’t an isolated oil deal.
A reset that connects everything from the government’s billion-dollar stakes in obscure mining companies…
To the reopening of retired nuclear facilities and Trump's obsession with invading Greenland and annexing Canada.
And if I’m right, the consequences won’t stop at the gas pump.
This could affect the purchasing power of the money you’ve saved…
The value of the assets inside your investment portfolio…
And which companies receive the first flood of capital as Trump’s New Dollar takes hold.
Strung together by a flurry of executive orders and a 13-nation treaty signed inside the State Department, most folks have no idea this is happening – let alone how to prepare for it.
That’s why, in my new investigation, I reveal how Venezuela fits into Trump’s secret dollar reset…
Why this controversial initiative could be exposed to the world as soon as December…
The five mission-critical companies I believe sit at the center of the new monetary system…
And the name and ticker of my No. 1 move to make today.
This is a hiring-firing compression. A 1.0 percent layoff rate holds claims down, and a 3.2 percent hire rate keeps the exit from unemployment narrow.
Both forces push the same series in the same direction. Fewer layoffs mean fewer new claims.
Fewer hires mean the already unemployed leave the rolls by running out of weeks, not by finding work. Job openings are not the constraint.
Employers listed 7.3 million of them in July, a rate of 4.4 percent. The openings exist, and the hires do not follow.
Low turnover produces a quiet weekly number. It does not produce movement.
The 27.0 percent long-term share is what that looks like from the worker's side. More than a quarter of unemployed Americans have now been searching for over half a year.
A claims print measures the cost of losing a job. It does not measure the difficulty of getting one.
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What moves first
Hires rate in the job openings and turnover survey. This is the direct monthly reading on the second door, reported about a month after the month ends. A rate climbing above 3.2 percent would show the freeze easing, and a rate sliding further would show hiring still shut. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Small business hiring plans. Firms report whether they intend to add workers in the coming months, which registers intent before any hire appears in the data. Rising plans would mark the earliest crack in the compression, and falling plans would mark it hardening. (Source: National Federation of Independent Business)
The share of consumers calling jobs hard to get. This tracks the same condition from the household side, where workers feel hiring conditions before surveys of firms capture them. A rising share would confirm the hiring door is still shut, and a falling share would show it opening. (Source: The Conference Board)
A labor market nobody is fired from is not a labor market anybody can be hired into. The first one produces calm numbers, and only the second one produces jobs.
Talk soon,
The Playbook Daily
