Layoffs, Household Wealth, the SOTU, & More

Week in Review: March 4-8

This week gave us a jobs report (covered at length by Anirban in a post earlier today), new data on job openings, quits, and layoffs, and a whole lot more. Oh, and a state of the union address. I didn’t watch that—9:00 PM on the night before the release of a jobs report is obscenely late—but did read it and discuss the most interesting economic proposal in it below.

Monday

TSA Checkpoint Travel Numbers

The number of passengers screened by TSA over the past week was about 6% higher than in 2023. No sign of a (nonseasonal) slowdown in travel volumes.

Tuesday

ISM Services PMI

The services sector grew for the 14^th straight month in February, according to this survey of industry managers. Maybe the most important point: prices increased again, but at a much slower rate than in January.

Gas Prices

Gas prices increased during the first week of March and, at $3.47/gallon, are at its highest average price since early November. Expect gas prices, which almost always trend higher through spring and summer, to keep rising.

Diesel Prices

Diesel prices fell slightly for the second straight week.

Wednesday

ADP Employment Report 

Private employers added a healthy 140,000 jobs in February, according to payroll processing firm ADP. The ADP Pay Insights report shows that pay increases continued to decelerate for job stayers (up 5.1% over the past year) but ticked higher for job changers (+7.6% y-o-y). Aside from last month, this is the smallest gap between pay increases for stayers and changers since ADP started tracking it in 2020.

Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS)