Employment development

clipped from www.contraryinvestor.com Over the past decade and one half, temp employment has both peaked and troughed ahead of the headline payroll trend.  As such, it has been a very important indicator to follow.  By the way, as you can see in the chart above, over the last few months, the year over year change in temp employment has gone negative.  Not a good thing in terms of foreshadowing forward headline payroll employment trends.  As per historical experience, negative rate of change trends in temp employment occurred just prior to the early 1990’s and 2001 recession, but not during the mid-cycle economic slowdown of the mid-1990’s.  Are current temp employment numbers and trends telling us the next recession is simply not far off?  We’ll just have to see what happens ahead, but for now we take this message seriously.