The S&P 500 fell 1.87%, NASDAQ collapsed 4.53%, and Friday’s jobs report came in at a disappointing +199,000 net jobs in December vs.
At year’s end, Ed Yardeni tallied the performance of the major market regions of the world – in both local currencies and U.S.
The first number came out last Tuesday, and it seemed to fulfill one of my 10 predictions that came out in my column here that morning, January 4: Prediction #3: “Most of those ‘missing’ American workers will get back to work.
On Tuesday, January 4, the Labor Department announced that the number of job openings in the United States decreased by nearly half a million, from an upwardly revised 11.033 million on October 31 to 10.562 million on November 30.
The second piece of good news came out last Wednesday, when the ADP payroll report said that private payrolls increased by 807,000 in December! That’s more than four times Friday’s payroll report.
Here’s a third piece of good news.
Covid and its consequences brought us a record level of savings, government benefits, and stimulus checks, which have now run dry, and so, work income is once again necessary.
Others have just resigned from the rat race and learned how to open their own business in cooperation with extended family or friends in the deep exurbs.
I’m no Baby Boomer.
As I showed recently, this has resulted in net-zero population growth in 2021 for the first time since the Civil War, although such records weren’t kept annually then.
We’ve gained about a decade in median age since the year we were married, when the median was 28.
Even before COVID struck, America’s Total Fertility Rate , the number of births per woman per lifetime, was 1.71, almost 20% below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed for population stability.
We basically need to face these demographic and financial realities if we want to fill those 10 million job openings.