U.S. unemployment data are quite useful indicators.
This is because the United States is relatively free to hire/discharge (Korea is at its disposal) so it quickly reflects the labor market situation.
A low unemployment rate means that there are many people working, so it means an economic boom (which means companies need a lot of manpower to make products), and a high unemployment rate means a recession.
Of course, it’s not released every day, but there’s a time difference of more than a month to announce it only, and this data can be found on FRED.
Unemployment Rate
We take data from the US Department of Labor called BLS and provide them in chart format at FRED.
1) Recession and unemployment rate.
The gray area is a sign of the recession in the United States, and if you look at recent years, you can see the dot-com bubble in 2000, the Lehman crisis in 2009, and the economic crisis from COVID-19 in 2020.
Unemployment rises unprecedentedly during this recession. Because companies predict that consumption will decrease during recession and try to keep profits as much as possible by reducing labor costs.
2) Investment ideas.
But if you think about it backwards,
You can see that there is always a recession when the unemployment rate is low. When we hum in a booming economy, there’s always a crisis.
Judging from this, it is concluded that we should be careful of investment when the unemployment rate falls and stabilizes.
** A place to check data.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE