by Calculated Risk on 1/01/2022 08:11:00 AM

Happy New Year! Wishing you all the best in 2022.

The key report this week is the December employment report on Friday.

Other key indicators include the December ISM manufacturing and services indexes, December vehicle sales, the November trade deficit, and November Job Openings.

----- Monday, January 3rd -----
8:00 AM ET: Corelogic House Price index for November.

10:00 AM: Construction Spending for November. The consensus is for a 0.6% increase in construction spending.

----- Tuesday, January 4th -----
10:00 AM ET: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for October from the BLS.

This graph shows job openings (yellow line), hires (purple), Layoff, Discharges and other (red column), and Quits (light blue column) from the JOLTS.

Jobs openings increased in October to 11.033 million from 10.602 million in September.

10:00 AM: ISM Manufacturing Index for December. The consensus is for the ISM to be at 60.2, down from 61.1 in November.

All day: Light vehicle sales for December. Sales were at 12.86 million in November (Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate).  Wards Auto is projecting sales of 12.7 million SAAR in December.

This graph shows light vehicle sales since the BEA started keeping data in 1967. The dashed line is the November sales rate.

----- Wednesday, January 5th -----
7:00 AM ET: The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) will release the results for the mortgage purchase applications index.

8:15 AM: The ADP Employment Report for December. This report is for private payrolls only (no government). The consensus is for 413,000, down from 534,000 jobs added in November.

----- Thursday, January 6th -----
8:30 AM: The initial weekly unemployment claims report will be released.  Initial claims were 198 thousand last week.

8:30 AM: Trade Balance report for November from the Census Bureau.

This graph shows the U.S. trade deficit, with and without petroleum, through the most recent report. The blue line is the total deficit, and the black line is the petroleum deficit, and the red line is the trade deficit ex-petroleum products.

The consensus is the trade deficit to be $70.0 billion.  The U.S. trade deficit was at $67.1 billion in October.

10:00 AM: the ISM Services Index for December.

----- Friday, January 7th -----
8:30 AM: Employment Report for December.   There were 120 thousand jobs added in November, and the unemployment rate was at 4.2%.  The consensus is for 400 thousand jobs added in December, and for the unemployment rate to decline to 4.1%.

This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms.

The current employment recession was by far the worst recession since WWII in percentage terms. However, the current employment recession, 20 months after the onset, is now significantly better than the worst of the "Great Recession"