For well over a year, I’ve been saying that job growth is not quite in a boom, but you can see one from here. After all that time, I think that we’ve largely arrived.

I was talking yesterday with an advisor who mentioned that when he goes to hire, he has been astonished by the salaries young, inexperienced workers are asking for—and, in many cases, getting. To me, this sounded a lot like the late 1990s, the last real employment boom we had here in the U.S.

Have we actually returned to boom times? Data junkie that I am, I decided to see what the numbers say.

Job creation close to 1990s boom
To start off, I looked at the two most inclusive employment surveys: the establishment (business) survey, which is the red line, and the household (personal) survey, which is the blue line.

When you compare current results to the late 1990s, the household numbers are almost identical, and the business numbers are somewhat worse. Note also that both surveys show job growth at about the fastest rate we saw in the mid-2000s. In terms of job creation, if the late 1990s were a boom, we are at least close. And if the mid-2000s were a boom, we're already there.


Unemployment levels look good

Another way to assess job market strength is to see whether employers are getting rid of employees. If we look at people filing for unemployment, we can see that, again, we are at the levels of the 1990s and better than the best of the 2000s. By this metric, we are also in a boom.


The workforce now, however, is much higher than it was in the 1990s or 2000s, so the reduction in layoffs is even more striking than it seems. If you look at unemployment claims as a percentage of the employed workforce, you see that we are doing even better than in the 1990s.


 

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