Economy Watch: Firing Level Low, but Hiring Level Not High

By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor

Jobs, jobs, jobs. On Tuesday, Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said that job-cut announcements in July rose 6 percent from June. It was the third month in a row that planned firings went up. The heaviest cutters these days are public and nonprofit entities, not private employers.

However, according to the company, that doesn’t augur a spike in layoffs, because in spite of the increases, the numbers are still close to the seven-year low of April 2010. Also, planned sackings are down 57 percent compared with July 2009.

“The increases are so slight and the monthly totals so low when compared to recent years that the trend in no way suggests a reversal of the significant slowdown in job-cut activity witnessed over the past year,” John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, said in a statement.

ADP Sees Modest Jobs Uptick in July

But what about hiring? The ADP National Employment Report also came out on Tuesday, estimating that nonfarm private employment grew 42,000 from June to July 2010 on a seasonally adjusted basis. Sometimes ADP is an accurate forecaster of U.S. Department of Labor statistics, which always come out a few days later, and sometimes it isn’t.

The month’s rise in private employment was the sixth consecutive monthly gain, according to the company, which gathers its data by processing payroll data. But increases have averaged only 37,000 over those six months, a modest total with “no hint of acceleration,” noted ADP.

Investor Interest Piqued by Largest 2010 CMBS

According to Rueters, a Goldman Sachs-Citigroup CMBS issue has gotten the attention of investors ahead of its sale date on Wednesday. Citing a unnamed investor, the news organization said that the triple-A-rated pieces of the pie are expected to price at about 5 basis points lower than anticipated.

At $788.5 million, the deal will be the largest CMBS so far in 2010. In terms of structuring, it’s one of a new breed of CMBS. Its average LTV ratio, for instance, is 53.7 percent, and the debt-service coverage ratio is 1.88, figures unheard of during the go-go (“everything in the pot”) days of mid-2000s securitization.

Wall Street bounced back on Tuesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 44.05 points, or 0.41 percent. The S&P 500 gained 0.61 percent and the Nasdaq advanced 0.88 percent.