相場ってそんな予測能力もあるんか（笑）
まあ、負けるだろうなと思うよ。
不正選挙も、2020年みたいにうまく行くかわからんしねw
(2024/1/6追記)
ソフトランディングできそうなのに、残念だよねw
The Job Market Can Stay Strong Without Rekindling Inflation
A growing supply of workers is helping balance out the labor market
By Justin LahartFollow
Jan. 5, 2024 9:00 pm ET12
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The Labor Department on Friday reported the December unemployment rate at 3.7%, unchanged from November. PHOTO: JEFF KOWALSKY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Not many people had a strong labor market and cooling inflation in 2023 on their bingo cards at the start of last year. And yet that is just what the economy delivered.
Expecting it to deliver the same in 2024 seems like a lot to ask for. But it isn’t impossible.
The Labor Department on Friday reported that the U.S. added a seasonally adjusted 216,000 jobs in December from a month earlier, bringing the total number of jobs gained last year to about 2.7 million. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal last January forecast, on average, that the country would shed jobs in 2023. They also forecast the unemployment rate would finish 2023 at 4.7%. Friday’s report put it at 3.7%, unchanged from November and just a bit higher than the 3.5% logged in December of 2022.
What makes the job-market story all the more striking is first, that it strengthened even as the Federal Reserve raised its interest-rate target to the highest level in more than 20 years, and second, that inflation still moderated. The Fed’s preferred measure of consumer prices was up 2.6% from a year earlier in November, versus a 5.4% on-the-year gain in December 2022. Excluding food and energy items, it was up 3.2% in November, which compared with 4.9% in December 2022.Change in average hourly earnings and consumer prices from a year earlierSource: Labor Department (earnings); Commerce Department (prices)2019'200123456789%average hourly earningsconsumer prices
Friday’s report wasn’t all sweetness and light. The unemployment rate held steady only because of a large drop in labor participation—the share of people working or actively looking for jobs. Indeed, the survey of households that the unemployment rate is based on showed the number of people employed fell by 683,000. The household survey is smaller than the much larger survey of employers the headline jobs figure is based upon, and can be more volatile from month to month. Difficulties seasonally adjusting the data—the pandemic disrupted many of the typical seasonal swings the economy experienced before 2020—might also be at work.
Even so, the household survey has generally shown smaller employment gains. Annual population revisions make year-over-year comparisons inappropriate, and the workers covered by the two surveys don’t perfectly match. But from last January (when the population revisions took effect) to December, the household survey showed an employment gain of about 1 million workers versus the gain of about 2.2 million jobs over the same period registered by the employer survey.
So one answer to how inflation cooled despite the job market’s strength could be that the job market might not have been quite as strong as advertised.
Another might be that the household survey is undercounting the number of people living in the U.S., and that is pushing the employment levels it shows lower. Indeed, the jobs reports from both last January and the January before that included substantial upward revisions to the household survey’s population and employment figures. These were in large part driven by the rebound in immigration since the early stages of the Covid crisis. The set of revisions in this January’s employment report, out early next month, might show a similar dynamic.
Furthermore, even though labor-force participation fell in December to 62.5% from November’s 63.8%, it was still above December 2022’s 62.3%. Absent that increase in participation, the unemployment rate last month would have been 3.5%. The increase in participation, despite an aging population, is an indication of how more potential workers are getting pulled off the sidelines.
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Increases in the supply of available workers are part of why wage growth has cooled: Average hourly earnings were up 4.1% from a year ago in December, which compared with a gain of 4.8% in December 2022. This trend, alongside the declines in inflation, has eased worries that the job market was overheating, and that the only way the Fed could hope to bring inflation under control would be to engineer a large increase in the unemployment rate. Now, if inflation keeps cooling, the central bank has scope to cut rates even if the job market doesn’t fall apart.
There is, of course, so much that could go wrong. But a year ago, it looked like plenty could go wrong, and then it didn’t.
Write to Justin Lahart at Justin.Lahart@wsj.com
