Navigating Aberrant Data

We’ve seen some really great economic data lately, and we’ve seen some lousy data as well. Some of it suggests that we’re in the middle of an incredibly strong expansion, while other data shows a sharp decline in key areas such as employment and corporate profits.
As you can probably guess, much of this aberrant data comes as a result of hurricanes Irma and Harvey, which wreaked havoc across the Southeast. Today we’re going to examine some of this data in an attempt to gauge whether the U. S. economy remains on stable footing.
Let’s begin with some of the bad data first.
It’s a bit hard to tell, but if you look at the right side of the chart below, which shows job creation by month, you’ll see the first monthly decline in net jobs added to the economy since 2010.

This post was published at FinancialSense on 10/13/2017.