Job Creation Has Been on a Downward Slide For More Than Two Years

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For some reason I was prompted to create this chart yesterday:

There’s a ton of noise in this series, but nonetheless the fitted trendline is fairly clear. Net new job creation¹ has been on a steady downward slide for more than two years, declining from a monthly average of 140,000 in 2015 to 100,000 in 2016 to 70,000 so far this year. I don’t know how meaningful this is, but it doesn’t really seem like a good thing, does it?

¹We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth. Thus, net new job creation is the number of new jobs minus 90,000.