Succinct Summation of Week’s Events 7.6.18 (plus the answer to age discrimination)

It's again time for the weekly summation but due to the holiday week, trading was relatively sparse so the swings back and forth relating to trade war concerns and employment numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt.  We'll be seeing the real reaction in the next day or two. But one bit of good news (that ironically ended up in the negative column) was that unemployment rose to 4 percent because more long term unemployed were getting back in the job market.  In other words, the economy is bright enough that the jobless who had given up before are now coming back.


The bonus to conclude our holiday week is another nifty graphic showing that we may be right around the corner from another exciting investment opportunity in emerging markets.  And since many of us are at or near retirement age and facing age discrimination if we wish to continue working, today's post on The Big Picture blog from the Washington Post is a very encouraging analysis of senior workers and the more concrete opportunities that are available to them (and us!)  (As before, the graphics did not translate to this blog so you'll have to click on the link provided to see the very informative charts.)  This article is really about workers over age 85 so the encouraging thing is that if what they say is true for the 85+ set, then it's triply true for the rest of us!  Hope everyone enjoyed the holiday.

Succinct Summation of Week’s Events 7.6.18

July 6, 2018 4:00pm by Barry Ritholtz

Succinct Summations for the week ending July 6th, 2018

Positives:

1. Non-farm payrolls rose 213k m/o/m, beating the expected 190k.
2. Home mortgage purchase applications rose a seasonally adjusted 1% w/o/w.
3. Job layoffs averaged a monthly 34,933 for second quarter, down from first quarters average of 46,793.
4. Factory orders rose .4% m/o/m, beating the expected no change.
5. Same store sales rose 4.4% w/o/w, up 1.3% from previous 3.1% rise.
6. Bloomberg consumer comfort index rose .3 w/o/w from 57.3 to 57.6.

Negatives:

1.  Average hourly earnings were up just 0.2%;
2.  Labor force rose by 601,000, sending UnEmployment to 4.0%
3. Jobless claims rose 4k w/o/w, from 227k to 231k.
4. Most of the unemployment increase came from long term unemployed (27+ weeks)
5. Home refinance applications fell 2% w/o/w, down a second straight week.
6. PMI Manufacturing index fell 1 point in June from 56.4 to 55.4.

Sun 7-8-18 BigPic: A record number of folks age 85 and older are working. Here’s what they’re doing. - The Washington Post

A record number of folks age 85 and older are working. Here’s what they’re doing.

By Andrew Van Dam  July 5, 2018  Washington Post

Seventy may be the new 60, and 80 may be the new 70, but 85 is still pretty old to work in America. Yet in some ways, it is the era of the very old worker in America.

Overall, 255,000 Americans 85 years old or older were working over the past 12 months. That's 4.4 percent of Americans that age, up from 2.6 percent in 2006, before the recession. It’s the highest number on record.

They're doing all sorts of jobs — crossing guards, farmers and ranchers, even truckers, as my colleague Heather Long revealed in a front-page storylast week. Indeed, there are between 1,000 and 3,000 U.S. truckers age 85 or older, based on 2016 Census Bureau figures. Their ranks have roughly doubled since the Great Recession.

America’s aging workforce has defined the post-Great Recession labor market. Baby boomers and their parents are working longer as life expectancies grow, retirement plans shrink, education levels rise and work becomes less physically demanding. Labor Department figures show that at every year of age above 55, U.S. residents are working or looking for work at the highest rates on record.

At the lower end of the age curve, the opposite holds true. Workers age 30 and younger are staying on the sidelines at rates not seen since the 1960s and ’70s, when women weren’t yet entering the workforce at the level they are today.

People who are still working at age 85 or above are, as you might guess, unusual. You won’t find them concentrated in any particular race, ethnicityor region, but they hold very different jobs than their younger peers and rivals do.

Most of the oldest workers are concentrated in just 26 of the 455 occupations tracked by the Census Bureau data. Those same 26 occupations are home to less than a third of the total workforce.

Workers age 85 and older are more common in less physical industries, such as management and sales, than they are in demanding ones such as manufacturing and construction.

Nobody questions whether older workers can make a difference. After all, some of America’s most prominent workers are around 85. The oldest Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is 85. Rupert Murdoch is 87. So are George Soros, Warren Buffett and Toni Morrison.

For a more nuanced picture, we can consider the specific occupations in which any given worker is likeliest to be in the 85-plus group. To enable detailed analysis on such a small population, we aggregated census data from 2001 to 2016.

Crossing guards are relatively likely to be age 85 or above. The same goes for musicians, anyone who works in a funeral home and product demonstrators like those you might find at a warehouse club store.

 But that chart tells only half the story. Few people of any age get the opportunity to work as crossing guards, funeral directors or musicians. So, while they may be elderly-friendly jobs, they’re not the top jobs for older people.

By sheer numbers, the top job among the 85-plus-year-olds is farmers and ranchers. It's also the one in which the distribution of older workers is most different from the distribution of the rest of the population. That category, which is distinct from farm laborers, houses 3.5 percent of the oldest workers — but just 0.5 percent of the rest of the population. 

Generational shifts drive much of the split. When today’s oldest workers were entering the labor force, farmers and ranchers had far more options than computer scientists did, and that’s shaped their professional choices today, seven decades down the line.

But it doesn’t explain everything. If you’re in your late 80s (or older) and are still in the labor force, tell us what you do for a living and why you’re still working. Is it by choice or by necessity? And would you feel comfortable driving an 18-wheeler? Employers want to know. 

Heather Long contributed to this story. 

Andrew Van DamAndrew Van Dam covers data and economics. He previously worked for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the Idaho Press-Tribune. Follow