Happy 4th and Wear A Mask

With a shortened holiday week, combined with an early, Thursday Employment Situation release, I will keep this month’s NFP forecast commentary short and get straight to our job data.

As we’ve been saying for the past two months, labor demand continued to rise in June, with new and total job listings rising 39% and 15% respectively in June.

Following the steep decline in March and April, new jobs have risen 75% off their lows from early May.

Consistent with the sharp uptick in labor demand, hiring velocity has accelerated 20% as job duration or time-to-fill has fallen from 54 days to 43 days.

Unlike what we saw in May with states in the south and west opening up much faster with more new job openings than states elsewhere in the country, increases in new job openings have been quite a bit more uniform of late as states are recognizing the peril of opening up too fast (finally!).

Looking at our paired-month data for June as a whole, new and total job openings rose 20% and 10% respectively, with gains in essentially every state.

Based on this job market data, we are forecasting a net gain of 4 million jobs in June, well above the consensus estimate of 3 million jobs.

Happy 4th and wear a mask.