Yellen To Give More Weight to Job Openings and Turnover

Janet Yellen arrives on Capitol Hill today to submit herself to questioning from the House Financial Services Committee. The new Fed Chair will likely be grilled on what metrics she will be using to determine whether the labor market is improving.
Amid declining participation in the job market, the unemployment rate — which now sits at 6.6% — has become a less useful measurement because people are dropping out of the labor market altogether rather than behaving like traditionally unemployed people do.
For traders looking to predict Fed policy, it might be useful to look at the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, released Tuesday morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey measures the number of new job openings, and the rate at which workers are starting and leaving their jobs. The BLS announced this morning that 4.4 million people started and left jobs in December, little change from November. There were modest changes in the number of new job openings in December as well.
Another statistic in the Turnover Summary that Yellen has previously said she’ll focus on is the percentage of workers who are quitting each month. Yellen said last year that, “a pick up in the quit rate, which also remains at a low level, would signal that workers perceive that their chances to be rehired are good — in other words that labor demand has strengthened.”

via Fortune

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency
trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza