The jobs market is weaker than it looks

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You may have missed last week's jobs report, though our Kyle Campbell did not. Traditionally released on the first Friday of the month, it came out on Thursday because of the Independence Day holiday on Friday. And with everything going on this weekend, the nation's 250th anniversary, crazy World Cup matches, Taylor Swift getting married, it was easy to miss.

But the report is  worth spending a minute on. It wasn't good. The nation created just 57,000 jobs in June, and May and April were both revised down. June's number was about half what the consensus expected, and it led to more angst about how and when the Fed could or would get going on cutting interest rates.

But the number that stood out to me was one buried in the report. The average monthly job growth over the past year is just 36,000. The number was so low I went to the St. Louis Fed's FRED database to look at the series and see for myself. Now, one bad month is nothing to be concerned about. It could be an outlier, it could get revised higher, it could even just be a bad month. It's not a trend. Even two or three months is not really a trend. But a year is a trend, and a year of creating just 36,000 jobs a month is a bad trend. It doesn't on its own say the economy is headed for a recession, but it does say that the economy has such little momentum that some other thing could push it into a recession.

Right now, though, the economy and the credit markets do appear to be OK. There are two indexes the Chicago Fed puts out that are good barometers. One is the National Activity Index and the other is the National Financial Conditions Index. The NFCI for June was at -0.5, which is actually good. The index is constructed such that zero represents normal conditions, and negative numbers represent loose credit conditions. The NAI for May was at -0.10, which isn't bad but not really good. For this series, negative numbers represent growth below the average.

So the two combined say the economy is roughly on its long-term growth trend. The low jobs numbers for the past 12 months I'd think are something of a drag on that trend, but I think we'll be OK just so long as some unexpected bad thing doesn't happen.

The future of the history of money

I have a little bit of a history with the Museum of American Finance, so to speak, so I'm biased in their favor, and was happy to see that their new location in Boston opened this weekend and that the museum finally has a new home. Our Carter Pape and Megan Ryan wrote about the museum and its newest exhibits at its new home on the Boston waterfront.

(While we're talking about history, be sure to read Carter's story about the history of money technology, going all the way back to Benjamin Franklin's first efforts at fighting counterfeiters.)

The museum, founded in New York in 1988 in the wake of the Crash of '87, is an incredible repository of the history of money and banking in America, with everything from the earliest coins and bank notes to the latest bitcoin miners. Its collection is fascinating and comprehensive, and if you can't get up to Boston its website has some good digital collections you can rabbithole down. That's where I got this image of ticker tape of the opening trades from the Crash of '29:

Museum of American Finance

Every exhibit is free, from "AI Alexander Hamilton" to the "Future of Finance," and there is something wonderfully ironic about a museum of money not requiring any money to get in the door.