Thoughts on Economy, Jobs and Schools

At Trinity, we are constantly reviewing and assessing a myriad of investment insights to inform and challenge our own thinking, as well as to help make sense of what we’re seeing in the global and national economic picture. One of the sources we’ve long trusted is Hedgeye, a group of data-driven investment researchers that have been providing differentiated investment insight for more than a decade.

Making sense of our nation’s economy as we begin to exit Covid is not lacking of opinion and speculation. However, with data as the foundation for his opinion, Hedgeye’s Josh Steiner offers up insights about our economy that we’re not gleaning from typical news sources. We encourage reading this brief commentary from Steiner about why, 15 months after Covid began, the U.S. has 16 million Americans receiving unemployment benefits (2.5x the amount compared to the peak of the Great Financial Crisis in May 2009), yet there are 8.1 million job openings. He’s suggesting three things are accounting for this:

•  Workers are afraid to return to the workforce due to Covid.

• Workers have children who are not in school and childcare options are expensive or unavailable

• People are “earning” enough from enhanced unemployment benefits that they do not have the economic incentive to return to work

As Steiner suggests, by following the data we can begin to see what will likely unfold in the months ahead as schools fully reopen nationwide and provide a necessary pathway for millions of workers to go back to work. You’re likely familiar with the phase, it’s the economy, stupid. But right now, and perhaps in the near future, one might say it was schools that had a such a surprising, second-hand impact on employment, benefits and the economy.