United States

For the UnitedStates, we’ve added the New Hires Quality Index from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.  

The data set helps at tracking the earning power of newly hired workers, providing insights in the dynamics of the labor market, and understanding the characteristics of new jobs in the economy. To capture this concept of “quality” (i.e., job pay),the source focuses on the newly hired workers’ occupations, rather than the industry sector, by cross-referencing the CPS (Current Population Survey) and the OES (Occupational Employment Statistics) datasets. Further details of the methodology can be accessed here.

The dataset is broken-down into 4 main variable types:

• Number of new hires
• Hourly Wages
• Wage Bill, defined as the product of the two variables above
• Number of new hires per capita

The chart below displays the NHQI volume index as YoY % change, together with the breakdown by Education in the second pane. Comparatively, it appears that the Global Financial Crisis(GFC) has impacted deeply people with a lesser-education background, as the series is still below its pre-GFC level. In the same idea, the current job recovery seems to favor more the ‘more-educated population, which should be put in perspective with the fact that job losses at the beginning of the pandemic were highly concentrated among the less-educated.

In this second chart, we then looked at the NHQI Wage Bill Index, which is calculated as the product of the Volume and Wage indices.

The series below represents the share of the new hires wage bill with less than a bachelor’s degree in the total, which is now reaching its lowest point. While can argue that the steady decrease can either be explained by the ‘Wage’ or the ‘Volume’, the second pane shows that Wages have been almost constant for the less-educated part of the population, indicating that a decrease in Volume, i.e., the number of new hires with less than a bachelors’ degree, explains the decrease of the % share.

World: ISDA-Clarus RFR indicator

While the end of year seems distant, IBOR (InterBank Offered Rates) will be phased out in a couple of months and the financial industry needs to transition to anew set of interest rate benchmarks.  

Related to this topic, we’ve just added the ISDA-Clarus RFR Adoption indicator, and its breakdowns. Its purpose is to monitor ‘how much derivatives trading activity is conducted in risk-free rates (RFRs)’, which are identified as the alternative. Currency breakdowns (AUD, GBP UDS, JPY, CHF, EUR) are also available.

Russia

For Russia, we’ve added a dataset from the Central Bank, covering inflationary expectations.

In the chart below, we created an average of all components (Households, Retail Trade, Wholesale Trade, Mining, Industrial Production, Manufacturing, Services, Agriculture, Construction, Transportation)., and calculated that the best correlation (close to 0,8) with inflation happens when our constructed mean is pushed forward by 5 months.

This then led to a simple regression model, allowing us to calculate a 5 months forecast of inflation based on the expectations.

Spain

For Spain, we’ve added a new source for Consumer Surveys, with the Spanish Center for Sociological Research (CIS, Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas).

In the chart below, we looked at the difference between Future Expectations and Current Conditions. An increased spread intuitively means that Households expects much more from the future than from today – typically highlighting a period of economic struggle or recession.