Facebook Inc. said on Wednesday that growth would continue to slow as its business matured and it reported a surge in quarterly expenses, disappointing Wall Street expectations that the costs of improving privacy would level off.
Facebook’s growth continues to slow down
Despite slowdowns in construction and minor declines in retail employment, the Louisville metro economy continues to add jobs. Even manufacturing, a sector that typically sheds jobs from January to January, added almost 2,000 jobs, a 2.2 percent growth. This compares to an average 0.5 percent decrease for January to January manufacturing payroll activity.
Despite local job growth, some potentially troubling signs across the country could slow down the local economy. Declining consumer sentiment across the nation and declines in durable goods orders could have further adverse impacts on local retail, potentially erasing some of the gains in local manufacturing employment. Additionally, food and energy prices continue to surge, which could also dampen consumer spending and apply greater pressure on the retail sector.
The first policy choice should be to quickly restore full employment. The Federal Reserve Board can do this by not raising interest rates and slowing the recovery in the name of fighting inflationary pressures until wage growth is much, much stronger. Congress and the president can pursue the return to full employment by making public investments that can create both jobs and future productivity growth. After this, policymakers should support those labor standards that can restore some bargaining power to low- and moderate-wage workers in coming years. That means policy actions such as passing a higher minimum wage, expanding rights to overtime pay, providing paid sick leave, protecting the labor rights of undocumented workers, and restoring the right to collective bargaining. Policymakers should reject trade treaties that provide corporations greater rights and sap our manufacturing job base.
The figure shows that in the three decades following World War II, hourly compensation of the vast majority of workers rose 91 percent, roughly in line with productivity growth of 97 percent. But for most of the past generation (except for a brief period in the late 1990s), pay for the vast majority lagged further and further behind overall productivity. From 1973 to 2013, hourly compensation of a typical (production/nonsupervisory) worker rose just 9 percent while productivity increased 74 percent. This breakdown of pay growth has been especially evident in the last decade, affecting both college- and non-college-educated workers as well as blue- and white-collar workers. This means that workers have been producing far more than they receive in their paychecks and benefit packages from their employers.
Another reason stocks are rallying to start the year is due to the January effect, a seasonal pattern that essentially boost the prior year's laggards, a pattern that can often be more acute following down years like 2022. We would point out that this past December did witness some of the most severe tax loss selling we've seen in years. Prior examples include 2000-2001, and 2018 and 19. In the first example, we experienced a nice rally that faded fast with the turn of the calendar month. The January rally was also led by the biggest laggards, the Nasdaq handsomely outperformed the Dow and S&P 500 like this past month. In the second example, the rally in January did not fade, but instead saw follow through to the upside in the following months. The Fed was pivoting to a more accommodative stance in both, but at a later point in the cycle in the 2001 example, which is more aligned with where we are today. In our current situation we have slowing growth and a Fed that is still tightening. As we have noted since October, we agree the Fed is likely to pause its rate hikes soon, but they are still doing $95 billion a month in quantitative tightening and potentially far from cutting rates. This is a different setup in these respects from January 2001 and 2019, and arguably much worse for stocks. A Fed pause is undoubtedly worth some lift to stocks, but once again we want to remind listeners that both bonds and stocks have rallied already on that conclusion. That was a good call in October, not today.
The other reality is that growth is not just modestly slowing, but is in fact accelerating to the downside. Fourth quarter earnings season is confirming our negative operating leverage thesis. Furthermore, margin headwinds are not just an issue for technology stocks. As we have noted many times over the past year, the over-earning phenomena this time was very broad, as indicated by the fact that 80% of S&P 500 industry groups are seeing cost growth in excess of sales growth.
Our 2022 State of Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report shows that Instagram is still the network of choice for influencer marketing campaigns. However, its popularity has dropped down a few notches, thanks to the growth of TikTok. 2ff7e9595c
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