Morning Report: Job cuts increase

Posted on December 7, 2023 by Brent Nyitray

Vital Statistics:

Stocks are higher this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are down.

Companies announced 45,510 job cuts in November, according to the Challenger, Gray and Christmas Job Cut Report. This is a 24% increase from October, but is down 41% from a year ago. Year-to-date, job cut announcements are up 11% compared to a year ago.

“The job market is loosening, and employers are not as quick to hire. The labor market appears to be stabilizing with a more normal churn, though we expect to continue to see layoffs going into the New Year,” said Andrew Challenger, labor expert and Senior Vice President of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

Tech is the biggest sector cutting jobs, followed by retailers and healthcare. Year-to-date, hiring plans are the lowest since 2015, and seasonal hiring is the lowest in 10 years.

This year has been been the least affordable for housing on record, but it looks like 2024 will be better, according to Redfin. The typical homebuyer earning the median income would have to spend 41% of their income on housing costs to buy the median home. Blame a combination of rising home prices in 2021 and 2022 along with soaring mortgage rates.

“A perfect storm of inflation, high prices, soaring mortgage rates and low housing supply caused 2023 to go down as the least affordable year for housing in recent history,” said Redfin Senior Economist Elijah de la Campa. “The good news is that affordability is already improving heading into the new year. Mortgage rates are coming down, more people are listing homes for sale, and there are still plenty of sidelined buyers ready to take a bite of the fresh inventory. We expect these conditions to continue to improve in 2024.”

The share of median income varies widely by MSA, with California cities like San Francisco requiring 85%, and Midwest cities like Detroit requiring only 18%.

Initial Jobless claims ticked up 1,000 to 220k. On an unadjusted basis they rose by 94k to 294k. It appears that the job market is really a tale of two markets: white collar jobs, where hiring is sluggish and skilled labor where there is still a shortage of workers.

Blackstone Mortgage Trust (BXMT) is a mortgage REIT that focuses on commercial mortgage backed securities and can be seen as kind of a proxy for the problems in commercial real estate. One big short seller is targeting the stock as credit losses are looking to be picking up. As this stock goes, so goes the pain in the banking sector and possible rate cuts.

Filed under: Economy |

« »

27 Responses

  1. jnc4p's avatar
    jnc4p, on December 7, 2023 at 2:19 pm said:

    Perfect ending:

    “George Santos Is Making a Dumb Amount of Money Off Cameo
    By Matt Stieb, Intelligencer staff writer
    …
    Santos first set the price for a video at $75, with a message on the account stating that he would record only 150 messages. But as the requests flooded in, he killed that limit and raised the price to $150. The demand did not waver, and he raised it to $200, and then to $300. As of Wednesday, the price for a roughly 45-second video was $400. If the pace keeps up, he is expected to dwarf his congressional salary in just a few hours of work in total.”

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12/george-santos-goes-on-cameo-just-after-house-expulsion.html

    Like

    Reply
    • Let the mutherfuker burn!'s avatar
      Let the mutherfuker burn!, on December 8, 2023 at 11:17 am said:

      This may not be popular to say here but Lethal Weapon is the better movie set at Christmas. I liked Die Hard, but never understood the cultural phenomenon on the right over it. Mel Gibson was a more interesting character. If I’m not mistaken, LWII was also set at Christmas and featured an outstanding performance by Joe Pesci.

      Like

      Reply
    • jnc4p's avatar
      jnc4p, on December 8, 2023 at 12:20 pm said:

      Hmm, now I need to go watch this:

      “Most people don’t realize the movie was based on a 1979 pulp novel called Nothing Lasts Forever by a journeyman crime writer named Roderick Thorp. In Fact, Nothing Lasts Forever was the sequel to Thorp’s 1966 novel The Detective, which featured the same main character and was also made into an eponymous movie in 1968 starring Frank Sinatra. Though “The Detective” was actually one of the biggest hits of 1968, it’s been largely forgotten in the decades since. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to contemplate that Bruce Willis’ performance in “Die Hard” is picking up where Sinatra left off.”

      Like

      Reply
  5. jnc4p's avatar
    jnc4p, on December 8, 2023 at 12:16 pm said:

    A glimmer of self awareness at the Atlantic:

    “The Left Can’t Afford to Go Mad

    A second Trump term would require an opposition that focuses on his abuses of power—and seeks converts rather than hunting heretics.
    By Helen Lewis

    December 8, 2023, 6 AM ET
    …
    Rather than focusing on how to oppose Trump’s policies, or how to expose the hollowness of his promises, the resistance simply wished Trump would disappear. Many on the left insisted that he wasn’t a legitimate president, and that he was only in the White House because of Russian interference. Social media made everything worse, as it always does; the resistance became the #Resistance. Instead of concentrating on the hard work of door-knocking and community activism, its members tweeted to the choir, drawing no distinction between Trump’s crackpot comments and his serious transgressions. They fantasized about a deus ex machina—impeachment, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the pee tape, outtakes from The Apprentice—leading to Trump’s removal from office, and became ever more frustrated as each successive news cycle failed to make the scales fall from his supporters’ eyes. The other side got wise to this trend, and coined a phrase to encapsulate it: “Orange Man Bad.”

    The Trump presidency was a failure of right-wing elites; the Republican Party underestimated his appeal to disaffected voters and failed to find a candidate who could defeat him in the primary. Once he became president, the party establishment was content to grumble in private and grovel in public. But the Trump years demonstrated a failure of the left, too. Trump created an enormous reservoir of political energy, but that energy was too often misdirected. Many liberals turned inward, taking comfort in self-help and purification rituals. They might have to share a country with people who would vote for the Orange Man, but they could purge their Facebook feeds, friendship circles, and perhaps even workplaces of conservatives, contrarians, and the insufficiently progressive. Feeling under intense threat, they wanted everyone to pick a side on issues such as taking the Founding Fathers’ names off school buildings and giving puberty blockers to minors—and they insisted that ambivalence was not an option. (Nor was sitting out a debate, because “silence is violence.”) Any deviation from the progressive consensus was seen as a moral failing rather than a political difference.”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-biden-democratic-left-opposition/676141/

    Like

    Reply
  8. Brent Nyitray's avatar
    Brent Nyitray, on December 9, 2023 at 6:17 pm said:

    The Penn President has resigned.

    Between this and the Bud Light boycott, IMO 2023 is the year woke jumped the shark.

    Like

    Reply
  9. Let the mutherfuker burn!'s avatar
    Let the mutherfuker burn!, on December 10, 2023 at 5:40 pm said:

    The purposeful obtuseness on the part of the media is fascinating

    https://x.com/steveguest/status/1733878499255955806?s=46&t=vSGsUlnc4rLxcUf7zfUiHg

    Its a complete Who Ya Gonna Beleieve, Me or Your Lying Eyes?

    Like

    Reply
  11. Let the mutherfuker burn!'s avatar
    Let the mutherfuker burn!, on December 12, 2023 at 8:18 am said:

    Some hawt Red on Red action here.

    https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/tillis-calls-vance-remarks-ukraine-003928070.html

    Tillis’s answer here is awfully precise,

    “If you’re talking about giving money to Ukrainian ministers — total and unmitigated bull‑‑‑‑,” Tillis continued. “Not productive conversation … not real happy about it.”

    Implies there is consideration among Republicans about cutting SS benefits to fund Ukraine aid.

    Like

    Reply

Be kind, show respect, and all will be right with the world.