Detentions at the Border
NFP due out 6Dec2024. Consensus appears to be 195K, after last month’s awful 12K.
What might prompt another downside surprise?
Part of the consensus story seems to be immigration.
As a VERY crude proxy I grabbed data on detentions from ICE and compared it’s 3mth growth rate to US NFP.
There is a lag in the collection of the Detentions data (orange line ends before the blue line).
There appears to be a cursory relationship. The apriori is that this is (in part) causal, but a simple correlation analysis like this can’t discern causality.
For argument’s sake, let’s assume there is some causality here. The most recent decline in payroll growth could have been an indication that Detentions slowed further. I’m not an expert in this field, but the rhetoric I heard by the Biden/Harris campaign seems to support such a decline.
As for future NFP growth, that would depend on nowcasting and forecasting Detentions. A Trump administration that reduces immigration flows even further could put more downside pressure on NFP if this relationship holds.