For some reason I was prompted to create this chart yesterday:
There’s a ton of noise in this series, but nonetheless the fitted trendline is fairly clear. Net new job creation1 has been on a steady downward slide for more than two years, declining from a monthly average of 140,000 in 2015 to 100,000 in 2016 to 70,000 so far this year. I don’t know how meaningful this is, but it doesn’t really seem like a good thing, does it?
1We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth. Thus, net new job creation is the number of new jobs minus 90,000.