If NFP Employment Growth Had Grown in 2017 Like It Did in 2016

We’d have had over 340,000 more jobs in December.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (blue), and 2016 linear deterministic exponential trend set to match 2017M01 value (red), in 000’s, seasonally adjusted, on log scale. Orange shading denotes 2017 data. Source: BLS December 2017 release, author’s calculations.