More bad economic news: In advance of a Labor Department report due out on Friday, the payroll firm ADP reported Wednesday that an estimated 532,000 workers had been dropped from American payrolls in May. ADP also reported that it was increasing its number of laid-off workers in April, from 491,000 to a new estimate of 545,000.
This is obviously not good news. At the same time, economists expect the recovery, when it comes, to happen in a certain order: The markets will come back first, followed by the employment numbers. Trailing all of that will be the housing market.
That makes some intuitive sense. The stock market is forward-looking, and prices will rise when people think the economy is headed in the right direction. We may be seeing the first stirrings of that already. The employment figures will be those rosy predictions taking hold in the here and now. And once people are back to work, they will go back to investing in the housing market.
Still, unemployment is perhaps the central issue in the recession. Until we start to see those numbers heading in the right direction, it will be hard to be optimistic about this economy.
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