Friday, June 19, 2009

Unemployment Friday

The California employment report for May was bad.

Most everyone (including me) interpreted last month's slight decrease in the unemployment rate as an aberration. That proved to be correct with unemployment shooting up to 11.5%

The payroll jobs number was very disapointing, 69,000 lost jobs in May, on top of 63,000 in April. These numbers are not much lower than what we saw this winter. The pace of job losses is not decelerating as quickly as we would like or thought. No seasonal gain in construction, resulting in another seasonally adjusted 11,000 lost jobs. Manufacturing and Professional and Business Services also dropped by 10,000+.

Interestingly, year-year farm job estimates are -2% for the state, but the San Joaquin Valley is actually up 0.4%. I haven't gone through the data to locate the declining regions, but the farm data can be noisy month to month. Still, we have yet to see any negative farm numbers in the region that is the heart of the "water crisis."

A similar story around the Valley metros. More later.

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