The Goat Pen

New York (CNN Business)The US labor market keeps getting stronger.
Employers added 263,000 jobs in April, another surprisingly strong month of hiring. Economists surveyed by Refinitiv expected the economy to add only 185,000 jobs last month.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, the lowest level since December 1969.
Indications of strength of the labor market could be found throughout the report. The average hourly wage was up 3.2% compared to a year ago, well above the 1.9% rise in prices, meaning real gains in the paychecks of average workers.

If anything, one of the greatest headwinds for the labor market right now is a lack of workers to fill the job openings that employers have. The unemployment rate fell partly because the size of the labor market contracted slightly during the month.
Still hiring has hummed along at an impressive pace, far longer than many economists had expected.

Still, another strong report is undoubtedly good news for President Donald Trump, who saw his approval rating for his handling of the economy rise to 56% in the most recent CNN poll, the highest mark of his tenure.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/03/economy/ ... index.html

Why Wages Are Finally Rising, 10 Years After the Recession

Average hourly earnings in April were 3.2 percent higher than a year earlier, the ninth straight month in which growth topped 3 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Other measures diverge on the exact timing and rate of increase, but not on the basic trend: Wage growth, long stuck in neutral, has at last found a higher gear.

Which workers are benefiting?

The recent gains are going to those who need it most. Over the past year, low-wage workers have experienced the fastest pay increases, a shift from earlier in the recovery, when wage growth was concentrated at the top.

Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Evercore ISI, estimates that the minimum-wage increases account for a quarter to a third of low-wage workers’ gains over the past three years. The rest is most likely a result of a tightening labor market that is forcing employers to raise pay even for workers at the bottom of the earnings ladder.

Ms. Gimbel noted that better-paying industries had experienced faster job growth in recent months, while the fastest wage growth had been in lower-paying industries. That could indicate that sectors like health care and manufacturing are snapping up workers, forcing retailers and restaurants to raise pay to compete.

In recent months, more than 70 percent of people getting jobs had not been counted as unemployed the previous month. That is well above historical levels, and a sign that the strong labor market is drawing people off the sidelines.

How high can wage growth go? Three percent is hardly a breakneck pace for wage growth. In the tight labor market of the late 1990s and early 2000s, wage growth for nonsupervisory workers topped 4 percent for several years without causing runaway inflation.

Mr. Ozimek sees no reason that history can’t repeat. Hiring remains strong, suggesting that companies are still able to find the workers they need, even if they have to work a bit harder to get them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/busi ... e=Homepage

F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016

WASHINGTON — The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?

The woman had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.

The American government’s affiliation with the woman, who said her name was Azra Turk, is one previously unreported detail of an operation that has become a political flash point in the face of accusations by President Trump and his allies that American law enforcement and intelligence officials spied on his campaign to undermine his electoral chances.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. Halper, Robert D. Luskin. Last year, Bill Priestap, then the bureau’s top counterintelligence agent who was deeply involved in the Russia inquiry, told Congress during a closed-door hearing that there was no F.B.I. conspiracy against Mr. Trump or his campaign.

The F.B.I. instructed Mr. Halper to set up a meeting in London with Mr. Papadopoulos but gave him few details about the broader investigation, a person familiar with the episode said.

His job was to figure out the extent of any contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russia. Mr. Halper used his position as a respected academic to introduce himself to both Mr. Papadopoulos and Mr. Page, whom he also met with several times. He arranged a meeting with Mr. Papadopoulos in London to discuss a Mediterranean natural gas project, offering $3,000 for his time and a policy paper.

The F.B.I. failed to glean any information of value from the encounters, and Ms. Turk returned to the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/p ... e=Homepage

A President Trump could destroy the world economy

Mr. Trump’s policies, however, could trigger a trade war, or wars, thus threatening the achievements of the past three decades without helping Americans who need it most.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... cb234d4444

Professor Tiger wrote:The people at CNN must have taken a lot of vicodin before publishing this:

New York (CNN Business)The US labor market keeps getting stronger.
Employers added 263,000 jobs in April, another surprisingly strong month of hiring. Economists surveyed by Refinitiv expected the economy to add only 185,000 jobs last month.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, the lowest level since December 1969.
Indications of strength of the labor market could be found throughout the report. The average hourly wage was up 3.2% compared to a year ago, well above the 1.9% rise in prices, meaning real gains in the paychecks of average workers.

If anything, one of the greatest headwinds for the labor market right now is a lack of workers to fill the job openings that employers have. The unemployment rate fell partly because the size of the labor market contracted slightly during the month.
Still hiring has hummed along at an impressive pace, far longer than many economists had expected.

Still, another strong report is undoubtedly good news for President Donald Trump, who saw his approval rating for his handling of the economy rise to 56% in the most recent CNN poll, the highest mark of his tenure.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/03/economy/ ... index.html

hedge wrote:Yeah, I was fixin to day, I don't know where all this economic growth and prosperity is taking place, but it sure isn't in eastern NC and I'd wager it's not in eastern Nebraska or western PA or any of the other enclaves of Trump Country. I'm sure the large urban areas that are mostly anti-Trump are the ones that have "benefited" the most, but the poor saps in West Va. and southern OH and other vast swaths of the midwest aren't doing much better than they ever have and in fact I'd say they're doing worse. This great economy is "helping" the people that it always helps, the ones that really didn't need it that much to start with. But it's fun watching Trump and Prof squeal about something they have no understanding or concern for, they just think it makes them look better, so they just keep on squealing...