Latest / Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update / 041: Deciphering Labor Market Trends and Consumer Confidence 08-29-23

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041: Deciphering Labor Market Trends and Consumer Confidence 08-29-23 · Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update

• 0:04
  Megan Horneman: Hello, I'm Megan Horneman, the Chief Investment Officer for Verdence Capital Advisors, coming to you today with Markets With Megan.
• 0:10
  Megan Horneman: Megan e wanted to go over a couple key data points that we got this morning.
• 0:13
  Megan Horneman: The first one was on the labor market, and this has been consistent with some of the other cracks we're starting to see in the labor market.
• 0:20
  Megan Horneman: This is the Jolt's Jobs Opening Report and what we've seen for many, many months since the end of the pandemic, that there's been well more than even two positions available for every unemployed American.
• 0:33
  Megan Horneman: What we're seeing is that job postings, or those amount of jobs out there that they are declining pretty rapidly.
• 0:39
  Megan Horneman: They actually fell in July by the lowest level since March of 2021.
• 0:45
  Megan Horneman: The component we look at is the amount of the jobs plentiful versus the jobs that are hard to get.
• 0:52
  Megan Horneman: This is a sentiment from the consumer and what you're seeing is that the jobs plentiful number versus the hard to get that actually fell to the lowest since April of 2021.
• 1:03
  Megan Horneman: If you go back to 1970, when you see that indicator peak and start to come down, this has always led to an increase in the unemployment rate.
• 1:12
  Megan Horneman: So again, this is further indication that the labor market is starting to weaken.
• 1:16
  Megan Horneman: The other thing we got is consumer confidence, and consumer confidence has been really resilient, but we've seen that this month we saw a pretty big drop in consumer confidence and it was primarily led by confidence on the present economic conditions, and that was led by the recent increase we've had in gasoline prices, as well as some weakening in the job market.
• 1:38
  Megan Horneman: This, we think, is these both are things that will continue to challenge the resiliency of the consumer spending that we've seen, and we'll think this will continue into the second half of this year.
• 1:48
  Megan Horneman: That's all we have today.
• 1:49
  Megan Horneman: If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to Verdence dot com.
• 1:53
  Megan Horneman: Thank you.