Confidence Survey Shows Jobs Are Still Relatively Plentiful

The first available monthly indicator of the labor market is the "jobs plentiful" series in the Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) survey. Today, June's reading showed that 38.1% of respondents said so (chart). That's a slight uptick from May, and a relatively high reading. The "jobs hard to get response" ticked down to 14.1%, which is a very low reading.

The latter series is highly correlated with weekly initial unemployment claims and continuing claims (chart). These two weekly series edged up a bit in June raising concerns that the unemployment rate may be heading higher. However, the CCI survey data suggest that the unemployment rate probably remained at 4.0% during June.