Is low unemployment bad for business?
DailyFinance.com has a great article on the new jobs outlook for the US that was reviewed by BloggingStocks. I think that they only thing that is missing is the acknowledgement that is nearly impossible to get zero unemployment. In fact, it would probably be bad for the economy to have zero unemployment!
What is the perfect unemployment rate? Ask 10 economists and you will likely get 12 answers. Most of them will likely say a number between 4-7%. When the country gets below about 4% then entry level jobs become quite expensive and inflation is almost guaranteed to happen. Once you are above 7% then the country starts to feel real pain in that large ticket items are harder to purchase.
We are currently just under 10%, that means we are about 25-30% above our optimum level. While this is not great, it does have a significant advantage for those industries and businesses that rely on a large workforce to create product.
As the unemployment rate drops, pay a bit more attention to stocks of companies that create bigger ticket items (e.g. automobiles, planes, vacations, computers, homes). As long as the unemployment is a bit high, be careful of those big ticket items and look for companies that make low cost items or items of necessity or need a large, cheap workforce (restaurants, grocery, food production).
While I have not reviewed Kroger [stckqut]KR[/stckqut] on this site, it is a good example of a company that will slightly benefit from high unemployment or at least not be hurt as dramatically as others like Ford [stckqut]F[/stckqut]. Kroger recently released a fairly strong quarterly earnings report.