Over a WaPo today: As you’d expect, I’m not at all happy to see the rollbacks in financial market regulations. But, given our ability to willfully forget the last financial meltdown, they’re far from unexpected. One of my key points here is that the powerful, rich finance lobby faces little in terms of countervailing pushback. That is, this isn’t good D’s outnumbered by bad R’s. Note also recommendation for a small tax on financial transactions. I plan to amp that up in coming weeks.

The strong jobs report at the end of last week confirmed that the job market remains on track. There was even a pop in middle-wage workers’ paychecks. Here’s some noodling on three things that could throw the recovery off track: Fed mistake, trade war, and supply constraints. I think the last one poses the biggest risks.

Note that I left out bursting finance bubble from the list of recovery de-railers. That’s because I don’t see near-term evidence of excessive speculation and under-priced risk. My concerns in this space are longer term.

Finally, while I don’t think Trump’s trade war is our biggest risk (unlike the respondents to this Twitter poll), I do think there’s risks from his chaotic trade policies becoming unbound. Heretofore, they’ve been more bark than bite, but as the protectionists become empowered, I don’t expect their actions to actually help working people. Instead, I expect them to needlessly piss off allies, dampen exports, raise prices on imports, and hurt workers in domestic industries that use the taxed metals as inputs. And there are millions more of those workers than there are in domestic steel and aluminum production.

“…these tariffs and their phony national security rationale won’t come close to helping most workers displaced by imbalanced trade. They won’t lead to investments in new, potentially competitive industries, like green battery production or other renewable technologies. They won’t create significant job opportunities in places that have been left behind, even at our current low unemployment . They won’t provide the apprenticeship, earn-while-you-learn program needed to train a displaced coal miner to be an MRI technician. They won’t roll back the wasteful, regressive tax cuts that robbed the Treasury of the resources to invest in public goods, from infrastructure to human capital.”

Payrolls rose 223,000 last month, beating expectations of 190,000, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 3.8 percent, its lowest level since April 2000, and before that, a level much more commonly seen in the 1960s. (At 3.75 percent, the jobless rate just missed falling two-tenths).

[Before the release, President Trump tweeted that he was looking forward to the jobs numbers. Since certain top officials, including the president, see the report on Thursday night, his tweet telegraphed the positive report, a highly unusual occurrence.]

The unemployment rate for African-Americans fell to 5.9 percent, an historical low point by a wide margin. Typically, the black unemployment rate is twice the white rate. But persistently tight labor markets are especially helpful for minority workers, as they make it more costly for employers to discriminate. In May, the black/white ratio was 1.7, still too high, but lower than average, underscoring the relative gains to less-advantaged workers.

Given the noisiness of these monthly data, our patented jobs smoother looks at average monthly employment gains over 3, 6, and 12-month intervals. As shown below, the trend in payroll growth is running at around 180K-200K per month, a solid trend that, if it persists, is strong enough to continue pushing down the unemployment rate.

Wage growth picked up slightly, up 2.7 percent overall and 2.8 percent for middle-wage workers. This too is a positive sign, as the tight labor market pushes up wage growth. The figures show yearly wage gains for all private sector workers and for the 82 percent that are blue-collar production workers and non-managers in services. The smooth trend in the first figure shows little by way of recent acceleration. Hourly wages were up 2.7 percent last month, a bit faster than the latest reading on consumer inflation of 2.4 percent.

The other figure, however, for middle-wage workers, shows a bit of a trend increase, as wage growth has accelerated in recent months and was 2.8 percent in May. This is once again consistent with the tight labor market disproportionately helping the least advantaged.

If it sticks, this “trend is our friend,” as is the solid payroll jobs’ trend. But is there anything out there that could whack it? The Fed could raise interest rates too quickly, but, barring a sharp acceleration in prices, which I judge to be unlikely, I believe they will be careful not to make this mistake. Trump’s trade war could, and probably will, escalate. That’s slightly worrisome, but remember, relative to other countries, the US is somewhat insulated to trade shocks as our imports as a share of GDP are only 15 percent, compared to at least twice that in Europe.

The biggest constraint to the jobs trend is labor supply. If the supply of available workers dries up, that will definitely constrain both job and overall economic growth. However, I’ve argued that this constraint may be less binding than many economists believe to be the case (yes, the May labor force barely budged, but these monthly numbers are especially noisy).

Employment rates of prime-age workers (25-54) were flat last month, but they’ve been climbing and have recovered 4.4 out of 5.5 percentage points, or 80%, of their losses since the recession. Historically, this indicator has flattened before recessions, but, May’s result aside, it has been growing lately for both genders, suggesting more room to run. We also know that there is considerable geographical variation in labor market tightness, so while some cities may be close to tapped out, supply-wise, other places are clearly not. At least thus far, these dynamics, combined with low productivity growth and weak worker bargaining power, have constrained wage and price growth.

I recently pointed out the prime-age employment rate is a better predictor of recent wage growth (nominal, i.e., before inflation) than the unemployment rate. The figure below (which does not include this month’s data) shows the results of a simple statistical model that predicts the annual wage growth of non-supervisory workers (the one that grew 2.8 percent over the past year). I run the model through 2014 and then predict wage growth based on a slack variable and lagged wage growth.

Source: BLS, my estimates.

What it shows is that variables that are more inclusive of slack do a better job of predicting wage growth. The unemployment rate says wages should be growing about 3.5 percent right now. The more slack-inclusive underemployment rate (U6) is a little more pessimistic/realistic but the men’s prime-age employment rate, which shows the most slack, does the best.

There are many caveats to this simple exercise–the differences are all within a margin of error and a more complete model would include the slow productivity growth that is putting downward pressure on wage growth. But it does provide some useful information. The notion that labor supply is fully tapped in the U.S. is not well supported by these monthly jobs reports. First, the persistently strong monthly payroll numbers are inconsistent with seriously binding supply constraints. Second, the employment rate for prime-aged workers doesn’t appear to have topped out. Third, while some price and wage pressures are building, these capacity indicators are not flashing red by a long shot.

Thus, especially from the Fed’s perspective, the assumption that there’s still room to run–that labor supply is not clearly exhausted–is the right one to make. The gains to African-Americans must be preserved and built upon. Same with that tick up in wage growth for mid-wage workers. Remember, in an economy with little union power, tremendous finance power, and thereby, far too much inequality, the best friend working people have is a persistently tight labor market.

Over at WaPo, I revisit the argument that a) since economists can’t tell if we’re truly at full capacity in the job market, b) there’s not much in the way and price and wage pressures, and c) the prime-age employment rate is not apparently topping out, we should assume there’s still economic room-to-run.

I’m on the road and in room 608, which is why I can’t get this old, uptempo jam by Horace Silver out of my head. If you let it run on YouTube, next thing you know, you’ll be hanging out with Sister Sadie, who is, ftr, great company.

Over at WaPo.

There’s a consensus of sorts that the future of work will be uniquely shaped by the gig economy and labor-displacing technology. At the risk of putting a damper on millions of conference sessions on this topic, I think we should be much less confident in our ability to predict the structure of work or the possibility of technological unemployment.

As new work from Larry Mishel reveals, the gig economy is a tiny share of the whole. We also do not see accelerated labor displacement in the productivity numbers (to the contrary).

But as I stress in the piece, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about ways to improve the quality of future (and present!) jobs. In fact, there’s a robust policy agenda that should be brought to bear, some of which is highly responsive to the increase in “arms-length” employment, where the distance between employer and worker is growing in ways that can undermine labor protections.

Various posts at WaPo for those interested:

Trump’s creating all sorts of waves in the oceans of international trade, and that’s led some analysts to worry that the reserve status of the US dollar could be under threat (63% of global reserve holdings are in dollars). While this isn’t the path I’d take to get there, of course–I’m solidly against Trumpian chaos–at this point, the costs of printing the premier reserve currency outweigh the benefits.

This one generated a fair bit of interest. It’s a local story with national implications about a head-tax on large businesses that the Seattle city council just passed to help them deal with their increasing homelessness problem. There are many levels to the story, including the basic revenue story, but also the costs engendered when large firms like Amazon come to town. Yes, they bring jobs, which is great, but they also raise housing prices and create more demand for city services. Yet, at least in this case, when you come to them for help, they stiff-arm you.

Dean Baker and I understand and support the motivation for a guaranteed jobs program.  But we’re wary of the public sector’s ability to create tens of millions of jobs to replace millions of lower quality jobs in the low-wage sector. That’s why Sen. Booker’s proposed 15-place pilot is a good idea to see how this works in practice before going national.

On a personal note, I’m sitting in a TV studio where my segment on the international trade fracas has been appropriately cancelled to report on the school shooting in Texas this morning. Of course, my cancellation is at should be–that’s not my issue.

According to the WaPo, this is the 16th school shooting this year. What should be shocking is how familiar this is to me and everyone else at the station. We all just go with the flow, as the anchors haul in commentators from their bench of experts in school shootings, and producers cut to whatever real time information they can glean.

The extent to which our country has normalized these horrific occurrences is the latest sign that there are ways in which the US is a failed state. I do not say that lightly, but a system that consistently fails to protect students and their teachers from death by firearms–that instead of solutions, has experts in school shootings on speed dial–cannot be called anything else but a failure.