Hadlock posted:

I have a very snarky post about well heeled non profits needed for housing for young families instead of the richest generation ever, but this is the wrong thread

Baddog posted:

I bitch a lot about the SEC, but we should be thankful our stock markets are as transparent as they are. Because for most Chinese there was no real place to put their money besides real estate. It's down to gold or like, bottles of baijiu now.

drk posted:

Its funny that you mention this, as the largest publicly traded Chinese company is... a liquor company that specializes in baijiu

Cyrano4747 posted:

Gologle posted:

Who are these Millenials born after 1981 that are getting 2.5 trillion dollars worth of pensions?

esquilax posted:

They lumped in "Defined Contribution Pension Entitlements" (read: 401k plans) into the pension bucket for purposes of that chart.

Only about half of that millennial bucket is defined benefit pensions, and that includes both traditional and non-traditional DB pension plans, but excludes social security entitlements.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/rele...ll;units:levels

Sundae posted:

The funny thing is, if you add 401(k)'s in to that number, it becomes a crazy number in a different, far more sort of way. $2.5T / 72.24M millennials = $34.6K per millennial. We're not young anymore; that number is horrifying.

SpartanIvy posted:

But have you considered how much avocado toast we have?

Lydia DePillis posted:

U.S. employers added 353,000 jobs in January.

The United States delivered a much bigger-than-expected batch of jobs last month, adding further evidence that the economy still has plenty of steam.

Employers added 353,000 jobs in January, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent.

After the loss of 14 percent of the nation’s jobs early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the labor market’s endurance for more than three years has surprised economists, who expected factors including the Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases to slow hiring more sharply. The strong data on Friday is likely to reinforce the Fed’s patience in beginning to cut rates.

“There’s layoffs happening, but workers are able to find new positions,” said Sara Rutledge, an independent economics consultant. “It’s almost like a ‘pinch me’ scenario.”

Ms. Rutledge helped tabulate the National Association for Business Economics’ latest member survey, which found increasing optimism that the country would avoid a recession — matching a turnaround in measures of consumer confidence as inflation has eased.

The growth in January was all the more impressive on top of upward revisions to the prior two months, which brought the monthly average job gain in 2023 to 255,000. Professional and business services accelerated to pile on 74,000 jobs, while health care added 70,000. The only major sector to lose jobs was mining and logging.

The bumper crop of added jobs, nearly twice what forecasters had expected, mirrors the similarly surprising strength in gross domestic product measurements for the fourth quarter of 2023.

The new year dawned on what has been an exceptionally good economy for many workers, with the number of open jobs still exceeding the stock of people looking for positions, even as new immigrants and women have joined or rejoined the work force in unexpected numbers. Wages have been growing faster than their historical rates, and a strong increase in productivity has helped keep those fatter paychecks from fueling price increases.

Over the past year, most gains have been powered by sectors that either took longer to recover from the pandemic — including hotels, restaurants and local governments — or have outsize momentum because of structural factors, like aging demographics and pent-up demand for housing.

Other categories that experienced supersized growth during 2021 and 2022, including transportation, warehousing and information technology, have been falling back to their prepandemic trends. Another handful of sectors, such as retail, have been largely flat.

In the coming months, economists had expected the labor market to become even more like its prepandemic self, without the giant job growth that followed the pandemic lockdowns. The latest numbers may call that assessment into question.

Even manufacturing, which has been in a mild recession for about a year, added 23,000 positions. That reflects optimism in the latest purchasing managers index for manufacturing, which jumped unexpectedly last month. Timothy Fiore, the chair of the Institute for Supply Management committee that oversees the survey, said it seemed like the beginning of a turnaround, even if a slow one.

“Now we’re starting to gain altitude,” Mr. Fiore said. “It’s not a fighter pilot gain; it’s a cargo plane gain.”

Jeanna Smialek posted:

The blockbuster jobs report bolsters the Fed’s patience as it waits to cut rates.

Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged this week and signaled that their next move is likely to be a cut — but they also signaled that they are in no hurry to make that change. Friday’s jobs data is likely to support their cautious stance.

Employers hired much more rapidly than expected in January, and average hourly earnings climbed 4.5 percent over the year, the fastest pace since September and a reversal after months of cooling.

While Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, made it clear during his news conference on Wednesday that the central bank is not bent on keeping interest rates high just to slow down the labor market, the report suggested that the economy may not be cooling quite as much as policymakers had expected.

And given that continued strength, the Fed is unlikely to feel pressure to cut interest rates at its next meeting in March. While policymakers do not want to hold borrowing costs too high for too long and risk a painful recession, the data suggest that a possible downturn remains very much at bay. Instead of faltering, the job market is booming.

The central bank’s policy rate is now set to 5.25 to 5.5 percent, a level high enough that economists think it will cool the economy as it trickles through financial markets and weighs on mortgage, credit card and business borrowing.

The Fed’s goal in trying to cool the economy is to rein in inflation, and price increases have been receding: Over the past six months, inflation data have been close to normal.

But that has come without much of a broader economic slowdown. While job openings have come down and the housing market slowed in reaction to higher rates, both hiring and consumer spending have remained surprisingly resilient.

Mr. Powell suggested this week that the Fed would like to see more evidence that inflation is coming under control before it begins to cut interest rates, and that it was unlikely to have enough data to feel confident in that before March.

Markets sharply dialed back the chances of a rate cut at that gathering following Friday’s jobs data.

But notably, Mr. Powell said that the Fed is willing to be patient — rather than wary and reactive — as it waits for wage growth to slow to normal levels. Some economists think that today’s relatively quick pace of wage gains could prevent inflation from stabilizing at 2 percent over time, were they to prevail.

“I think the labor market by many measures is at or near normal, but not totally back to normal,” Mr. Powell said. “Job openings are not quite back to where they were,” and wage increases “are not quite back to where they were.”

He added that wage increases “probably will take a couple of years to get all the way back, and that’s OK.”

Lockback posted:

Such a weird mix of economy adding jobs and layoff announcements dominating the employment news.

I know these aren't mutually exclusive at all but it still feels odd.

mrmcd posted:

It kinda feels like there's a recession of sorts in high paying white collar jobs (or maybe just revision to the mean of tech employment trends) but if you wanna work at a Whole Foods or something you can get a job today with a pulse and a valid I-9 document.

This doesn't necessarily translate into people feeling good about the economy though. If you and everyone you know is getting laid off from knowledge worker jobs and you can't get another one or can't get one for more than 80% of your previous wage, it doesn't make the Biden economy feel "good" to you.

I really should try to see if there's any actual data on this though, since my opinion is really just "vibes" at this point.

LanceHunter posted:

Of course, tech is one of those fields (like media) that tends to take up a lot more attention than its actual share of the economy. So the downturn there could have the people with the biggest platforms saying that the "Biden economy" is bad even when the majority of people are doing a whole lot better than they were 4 years ago.

Leperflesh posted:

journalists and instagram influencers are losing jobs while everyone else is doing better, basically, so hmm, I wonder why the news "feels like" it's all layoffs

Leviathan Song posted:

It's a bit more complicated than that there's a need for workers in aerospace and medicine both white collar and blue collar. We've been hiring people who left for tech startups 20 years ago back into aerospace in droves. It seems more like the economy is reshuffling towards different sectors than towards lower paying jobs.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

The "you have to laugh because the alternative is crying" joke in gamedev is that the only people who still have jobs are indies, who can't be fired but aren't being paid anyway.

Lockback posted:

Gamedev has always been big boom and bust cycles though.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Manufacturing in particular seems to be doing well.

LanceHunter posted:

There's a senior-level Program Manager talking about how she's only had 10 interviews after submitting 104 applications in the 100 days since she was laid off.

bob dobbs is dead posted:

10 from 104 is actually fine, her problem is 104 applications in 100 days lol