- On August 14 (Chart of the Week), we questioned whether the weakness observed in the July Labor Report was an isolated event or evidence for the continued cooling of the labor market. We speculated at the time that the rising pessimism reflected in Occam’s ‘Jobs are hard to get’ sentiment indicator might portend further labor market cooling.
- Updated Occam data shows that pessimism about job prospects has grown further still. The weak September 6th Labor Report affirmed this trend. We believe our “Jobs are hard to get” metric leads the jobs report results, so should this trend sustain itself, we expect to see further labor market weakness in the next report – become a subscriber today to monitor this metric into the next labor report.