Companies will soon start hiring for the holidays.
When that happens, people will declare we are in a full recovery.
I believe that is accouted for in the seasonal adjustment factor.
Unless the timing of hiring patterns are changed relative to historic norms (e. g. what Morningstar economist Bob Johnson speculates about college students leaving summer jobs early because college is starting earlier to complete semester by Thanksgiving, which led to artificially bad August BLS and slightly better than reality September BLS), then I think that is subtracted out from SAAR (
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/saar.asp).
However, hiring of seasonal workers is supposed to be up something like 4% this year, so that factor should presumably show up in employment numbers.
Steve Liesman on CNBC was talking about Philly Fed report released this morning, which came in stronger than expected (
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000123367&play=1, might indicate economy is growing
2 - 2.5% real GDP, vs. the
1.5 - 2 % everyone seems to assume. Morningstar economist Bob Johnson has also previously pointed out that
population growth has only been about
0.7% - 0.8%, where historically it has been as high as
1.5%, so 2.3% real GDP growth can be equivalent to about 3% historic real gdp growth on population growth adjusted basis. Not sure what the potential of economy is, but my guess is probably around 3.5% (real, i. e. adjusted for inflation), 4% max (?) Also, given that the drought has destroyed enough feed corn and soybeans to possibly knock 0.5% off of GDP, if we can somehow get 2 - 2.5% real GDP growth, that's pretty darn good news.
Also got to remember that 2/3 of our economy is consumption, and 2/3 of that is
services, not goods.
Have to separate out what sounds like bad news for multi-national companies and Wall Street from what may be a continued slow improvement for
Main Street (e. g. if multi-national has both domestic and international units, even if
international unit is bleeding money right now, if
domestic unit is still healthy and profitable, hopefully that doesn't translate into job losses in U. S. Plus have to separate out company specific restructuring such as Best Buy or HP when they layoff people to rebuild business and make themselves more competitive, vs. more macro, decreasing consumer end demand type cuts.