Economy update

The expansion is now the longest in American history. According to the Arizona Commerce Authority, metro Phoenix posted the largest job gain from May 2018 to May 2019, at 3.2 percent. Let's take a closer look:

Arizona and metro Phoenix reached a historic high in seasonally adjusted civilian jobs as of May (click on the charts to enlarge):

Median household income adjusted for inflation also showed gains:

So far, not so bad…

Let's see how that stacks up against some of metro Phoenix's competitors:

And median household income:

As you can see, metro Phoenix badly trails its competitors. Digging deeper, the state and metro have a persistent unemployment problem:

The unemployment rate in Arizona and metro Phoenix was significantly higher than the national rate and a peer competitor (others, too, but I left them out for simplicity's sake). Arizona actually lost 10,000 non-farm jobs year-over-year in May. Meanwhile, the bellwether metric (for Arizona) of construction employment remains in trouble:

Permits for single-family houses in metro Phoenix are far below trend — good news for containing sprawl but bad for a backbone of the local economy:

Earnings have been sluggish throughout this recovery, but metro Phoenix trails its peers:

In the important sector of well-paying information jobs, Phoenix trails important peers and even its turn of the century levels:

Phoenix lacks a data set for the software publishing sector, a sign it is not among the elite tech hubs.

A generalization: Phoenix and Arizona were ground zero in the housing crash, but have slowly come back without making any changes to the ideologically driven economic policies. The right can claim a victory of sorts, in that the status quo prevails. But it means Arizona and Phoenix are still punching below their weight, suffering from big social ills, and continuing their brain drain.

If you want to dig even deeper on state, county and metro peformance, check out the invaluable data from the St. Louis Fed's FRED site.