CHART OF THE DAY: Aggregate Hours vs. Real GDP

Today is, of course, Jobs Friday which mostly means you’ll (again) have to moat your psycho-emotional stability from the meme torrent of “slack” mentions and “Phillips Curve” references in order to get to the weekend.  

As always, there will be manic focus on AHE and the Payroll headline and rightfully so but, thankfully, we already know most of what matters as it relates to December NFP:

Asymmetries remain the macro risk managers Valhalla and there exists some nice (positive) asymmetry in the labor setup to close out 2017.  Let’s review and preview:

1. Payroll Growth:  Employment growth has accelerated for 2 consecutive months and anything >157K will = another month of acceleration.  ADP printed +250K and NFP consensus is currently 190K.  Taking the under on 157K is not a high probability wager.
2. Aggregate Hours:  The combination of faster payroll growth and an uptick in average weekly hours drove aggregate hours growth to a 28-month high in November.  Recall, assuming stable productivity, more hours worked = more output (i.e. if you are producing the same amount of stuff per hour but are working more hours then real GDP is higher … the same is obviously true for the growth version of those equations).  And …