00:00 Speaker A
Let’s talk about the jobs report tomorrow on deck. Diane, what do you expect?
00:07 Diane
We’re looking for north of a hundred thousand, that’s lower than it has been, but uh in line just a little lower than the hundred and thirty thousand we’ve had year to date. And what’s important is, and this is a point that J Powell made yesterday as well. He said the job market is solid. I think it’s a little smooshier than solid, but he said it was solid because the unemployment rate has remained low. You only need about a hundred thousand a month, or a little less than that, to keep the unemployment rate low. I think we’re going to tick from one 4.1% up to 4.2%. The consumer confidence surveys have shown that consumers are having a harder time finding a job, and the reason quit rates are low is because you don’t get as much of a premium for hopping a job, and there’s not as many opportunities out there. And we know from places like Indeed that internships and new job openings for new college grads are not what they’ve been. They’re at multi-year lows right now.
02:12 Speaker A
Now Trump’s crackdown, Diane, on illegal immigration. Um, do we know how that has impacted the labor market yet?
02:41 Diane
So that’s a great question. We’re all watching that. There has been some signs of it, but we don’t like to read too much into the household survey. It’s not seasonally adjusted on foreign-born versus native-born workers, and how many we’ve lost since March. There has been quite a few. That said, there is in the employment cost index today. Construction is one of the sectors, even though construction is is down. Um, it was down in the second quarter. Activity is down, interest rates are higher, the residential market is not going, the commercial market is not booming except for data centers. The construction sector has seen wages accelerate quite sharply. That’s one of the most immigrant-sensitive sectors. About 25% of construction nationwide is immigrant workers. And so if they’re actually feeling a shortage of workers in the employment cost index, the move up in construction was really quite startling between the first and the second quarter, and that would suggest that there are some pockets of shortages showing up.