Net Job Creation by Industry through July 2016

At SMU we almost always use three month moving averages to mitigate situations like the dismal and not credible May job creation statistics. In the July report May was revised up slightly from 11,000 to 24,000 and June was revised up from 287,000 to 292,000.

This week’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 255,000 jobs were created in July. Using a 3MMA, the result for July was 190,000 which didn’t entirely wipe out the May aberration but it did make it look a lot more credible. Figure 1 shows the 3MMA of the number of jobs created as the brown bars since 1990 and it is evident that there was a decline in 2015 that continued into this year.