Harriet Torry

speaker

611 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2017 last heard Dec 2024

Harriet Torry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Why the Consumer Confidence Engine Is Sputtering · 31 Jan 2023 podcast

So yeah, the labor market is definitely going to be under a lot of pressure in the months ahead, and it will be something to watch closely.

Wages haven't kept pace with inflation for everybody.

I mean, generally speaking, one of the positive trends that we've seen is that wages have tended to rise for those on the lowest end of the income spectrum.

Because there's been such strong demand for services, for things like line cooks, restaurant servers, a lot of frontline hospitality jobs.

So those types of jobs have seen pretty strong pay increases.

But

The higher up you go on the scale, generally speaking, the less chunky wage increases you've been seeing.

And of course, inflation has been extremely high.

So people tend to sort of feel poorer no matter how well their paycheck is increasing.

And regarding wages, although average hourly earnings have continued to go up, one thing that we've seen in the Labour Department's jobs report is that the number of hours worked per week has actually declined for two months.

So although the hourly pay is up, the number of hours is down.

And that is, you know, putting a bit of a dent in people's take home pay packets.

Yes, we do a survey every quarter.

The Wall Street Journal does a survey of economists.

And in the most recent survey, which was in early January, economists said that they placed a 61% probability on there being a recession in the next year, which is about the same level that we saw in October.

And that is very high by historical standards.

We generally don't see that type of elevation in that probability outside of actual recession.

So most economists do think that in the early part of this year that employers will start cutting jobs and we will see a slowdown.

But economists do have some hope.

You know, it's not inevitable that there will be a recession.

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