Atlanta Fed Says Workers Finally Benefiting From Recovery

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Here’s some potentially good news. There are various way of tracking wage growth (with or without benefits, employer survey vs. worker survey, nonsupervisory vs. everyone, etc.), and the Atlanta Fed has introduced a new wage index constructed from the Current Population Survey. In theory, this should provide reliable data with a large sample size and will be available monthly. The good news is that their index shows nominal wage growth increasing at a fairly healthy 3.3 percent per year:

Wage growth by this measure was essentially unchanged from April and 1 percentage point higher than the year-ago reading. The current pace of nominal hourly wage growth is similar to that seen during the labor market recovery of 2003–04 and about a percentage point below the pace experienced during 2006–07, which was the peak of the last business cycle.

Other wage measures will be released later this week. With inflation still well under control, this is good news for workers, and potentially bad news for Fed watchers, who hope they won’t use it as an excuse to raise rates. We’ll see.