Friday, December 02, 2011

Attack of the 99ers

(no, not the nitwit protesters)

I hate to say I told you so. . .

(here) (here) (HERE) & (here) (among others) (ok, maybe I don't hate to say it so much) but today's report from the Bureau of Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics bears out what I've been ranting and raging about for so long.

The 99ers are coming home to roost and will be a millstone around Obama -- and the economy's -- neck.

The headlines trumpeting the "unexpected" (not by me and those here) fall in the unemployment rate to 8.6% in November.

Yet in the report and somewhat less trumpeted are the facts as we have them.

ONLY 120,000 jobs were added.

Labor force participation FELL from 64.2 % to 64 %.

315,000 LEFT the labor force in November alone.

THESE ARE THE 99ers. Those who either expired their unemployment benefits OR just plain quit looking and can no longer collect those benefits and are therefore no longer counted as unemployed.

And only in the liberal media is this spun like it may be a good thing

The fall in the jobless rate was aided by 315,000 people leaving the workforce.
Aided? Really? You use the word aided to describe people who have given up?

Additionally, nearly half the jobs added were seasonal holiday temp jobs, which will largely go away in January.

Yet even these statistics don't really add up, as a talking head on Fox just pointed out.

If we assume that the worforce is 153,000,000.

And we say 120,000 jobs were added.

And 315,000 left the workforce in November

THEN that's 435,000 who are no longer counted as unemployed.

Lessee here -- 435,000 divided by 153,000,000 is .28%.

9.1 % - .28 % is 8.82 % unemployment.

Hmm.

Where's the other .22 %, the OTHER 336,600 people that should account for the rest of the drop?

Watch for a very quietly revised unemployment number for November.

Most of the reports out there have this information in it, playing it up or down to various degrees. But the fact is it's the headline most people read, and the administration will gloat on, that will stick with people just as I said it would.

UNEMPLOYMENT FALLS TO 8.6%!

Bloomberg:

U.S. Jobless Rate Unexpectedly Declines to 8.6%


Payroll gains in the U.S. picked up last month and the jobless rate unexpectedly fell to the lowest level since March 2009, a decline augmented by the departure of Americans from the labor force.

Payrolls climbed 120,000, after a revised 100,000 increase in October, with more than half the hiring coming from retailers and temporary help agencies, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey called for a 125,000 gain. The unemployment rate declined to 8.6 percent from 9 percent.

“It’s good news, not great news,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts, whose forecast for a 125,000 gain in payrolls matched the median forecast in Bloomberg News survey of economists. “The labor market is gradually healing. I wouldn’t take huge comfort that the unemployment rate is falling but some comfort that it’s edging down.”

Companies like DirecTV (DTV) have said they will keep a tight rein on spending and employment in 2012, reflecting concern over the outlook for demand, Europe’s debt crisis and the U.S. deficit. The scant number of jobs is limiting wage gains and restraining consumers’ ability to boost spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy.

Stock-index futures maintained gains after the figures. The contract on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index expiring this month rose 1.1 percent to 1,257.1 at 9:14 a.m. in New York. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose to 2.12 percent from 2.09 percent late yesterday.

Unemployment Rate

Revisions to prior reports added a total of 72,000 jobs to payrolls in September and October.

The unemployment rate, derived from a separate survey of households, was forecast to hold at 9 percent. The decrease in the jobless rate reflected a 278,000 gain in employment at the same time 315,000 Americans left the labor force.

“You’d like to see the unemployment rate coming down when people are coming into the job market, not disappearing,” James Glassman, senior economist at JP Morgan Chase & Co. in New York, said in an interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene.“That’s probably exaggerating the trend in unemployment.”

Private hiring, which excludes government agencies, rose 140,000 after a revised gain of 117,000. It was projected to rise by 150,000, the Bloomberg survey of economists showed.

Factory payrolls increased by 2,000, less than the survey forecast of a 9,000 increase and following a 6,000 gain in the previous month.

Retail Hiring

Employment at service-providers increased 126,000, including a 50,000 gain in retail trade at companies hired for the holiday shopping season. The number of temporary workers increased 22,300.

Macy’s Inc. (M), the second-biggest U.S. department-store chain, increased mostly part-time staff by 4 percent for the November-December shopping season. See’s Candies Inc., a chocolate maker owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said it would add 5,500 mostly temporary workers.

Construction companies shed 12,000 workers. Government payrolls decreased by 20,000. State and local governments employment dropped by 16,000, while the federal government trimmed 4,000 positions.

Average hourly earnings fell 0.1 percent to $23.18, today’s report showed. The average work week for all workers held at 34.3 hours.

Underemployment Rate

The so-called underemployment rate -- which includes part-time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want work but have given up looking -- decreased to 15.6 percent from 16.2 percent.

The report also showed an increase in long-term unemployed Americans. The number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or more increased as a percentage of all jobless, to 43 percent from 42.4 percent.

The jobless rate has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, the longest stretch of such levels of unemployment since monthly records began in 1948.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues last month cut economic growth forecasts for 2012 and said unemployment will average 8.5 percent to 8.7 percent in the final three months of next year, up from a prior range of 7.8 percent to 8.2 percent.

Growth in the U.S. and other advanced economies “has been proceeding too slowly to provide jobs for millions of unemployed people,” Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen said in a Nov. 29 speech in San Francisco. She called for “urgent” international action to combat a “dearth” of global demand.

Central Banks

Six central banks led by the Fed acted on Nov. 30 to make more funds available to lenders to preserve the global expansion. The move came after European leaders said they failed to boost the region’s bailout fund as much as planned, fueling concern about a possible breakup of the euro bloc.

The crisis in Europe and presidential election in the U.S. make it difficult to predict the level of economic expansion, causing DirecTV to “slow our growth rate,” Michael White, chief executive officer of the largest U.S. satellite-TV provider, said in an interview last week.

“We’re tightening our belts in terms of spending,” White said in the Nov. 21 interview. “We’ll cut back on overhead, hiring and programming.”

Payrolls may pick up as more businesses benefit from increased demand. Boeing Co. (BA), the largest U.S. aircraft maker, is hiring about 100 machinists a week as it boosts production by about 60 percent over three years to whittle down a backlog that now stretches to nearly 4,000 aircraft.














(hmmm. . .)











FUCK YER HOPE AND CHANGE



10 comments:

Unknown said...

The last was just the 'icing on the cake' :).

jeppo said...

From my perspective, creating 120,000 jobs and having unemployment drop four points is not too shabby at all. In Canada in November, 19,000 jobs were lost and unemployment went up one point to 7.4%.

That's two months in a row that jobs were created and the unemployment rate went down in the US, as opposed to two months in a row where jobs were lost and the unemployment rate went up in Canada. So comparatively speaking, America is doing reasonably well economically.

However, with the crisis in Europe driving investors to the US dollar and treasury bills, and the US government continuing to borrow and spend massively while maintaining low taxes, employment growth should be a given, in the short term anyway. And as MR points out, hundreds of thousand of Americans have dropped out of the labour force, so this growth may not be all it seems.

Obamanomics is simply not sustainable over the long term. Everyone knows this but no one seems to have a realistic plan and timeframe for balancing the budget. Mario Monti, the new Italian PM, has announced that Italy will balance their budget by 2013. So even the basketcase Italians are getting their fiscal house in order while budgetary discipline doesn't even seem to be an issue to the American political class. This isn't going to end well.

Pastorius said...

Yeah, 120,000 part time seasonal Christmas jobs at the mall. Woo hoo. Obama's recovery is gonna put us all in Recovery.

Fuck Obama.

Pastorius said...

Meanwhile, Jeppo, in the same month that 120,000 people got part time seasonal jobs at the mall, 395,000 people ran out of Unemployment benefits, meaning

THEY DROPPED OFF THE WELFARE ROLLS,

meaning,

THE GOVERNMENT NO LONGER CONSIDERS THEM UNEMPLOYED.

jeppo said...

Interestingly enough, 20,000 government jobs were lost in November, meaning that 140,000 private sector jobs were created (probably not all of them seasonal work at the mall). Again, that compares favourably with 19,000 jobs lost in Canada, and the malls are supposedly packed here.

Even more interestingly, according to CNN, the black unemployment rate actually went up four points, from 15.1% to 15.5% (they didn't say what happened with the white unemployment rate). That makes me think that the new jobs weren't all a bunch of affirmative action seat-warming positions. But then again, maybe it's harvest season somewhere and all the jobs went to illegal alien crop pickers.

Unknown said...

Hi guys.
Compare to December 2010.
The U.S. unemployment picture may seem unusually confusing these days. Gallup monitoring showed a sharp improvement in the jobs situation in November, particularly as companies added holiday workers. However, the government surprised Gallup and most other economic observers as it reported last month that the U.S. unemployment rate increased to 9.8% in November. It appears that the government made a larger seasonal adjustment than was generally anticipated for the month.ADP on Wednesday reported that the economy added 297,000 private-sector jobs -- far above the consensus expectation that the government on Friday will report the U.S. economy added 140,000 new jobs overall in December 2010.
Whatever the government reports about unemployment on Friday, Gallup's U.S. underemployment data for the end of 2010 show that nearly one in five Americans continue to be unemployed or employed part-time looking for full-time work.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/145478/gallup-finds-unemployment-december.aspx

Unknown said...

Incoming !

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/lies-damned-lies-and-unemployment-statistics_12022011

midnight rider said...

Heh, great minds. . .

Epaminondas said...

Brookings (institution of the left of center) just said we need to add 5 MILLION jobs to return to the day Obama was elected (which was 18 months after housing prices started sliding significantly, which was caused by the economy sliding even before that .... so a return to that level is not a return to wonder times).

To add 5 million jobs by the time the next president finishes a 4 year term that means we need to add 83,000 jobs a month above first time unemployment claims + number of of people entering the workforce.
The birth rate of the usa is 13.8 per thousand. Based on 300,000,000 people that means 345,000 PER MONTH.
First time claims have been about 400,000 per month.

To get back to working conditions in Nov 2008, by Nov 2016 we need to ADD (as of this month) ~ 830,350 jobs per month EVERY MONTH from now until then.

Comments on arithmetic welcome.

The way things are being done right now, WILL NOT WORK

Epaminondas said...

PS.... we added 120k jobs, 400k people made 1st time claims, and 315k fell off the back end of unemployment reporting, that mean the number is MINUS 595k

Even if we IGNORE new people coming into the jobs market we are ~700k to the WRONG SIDE of what we need