Category: employment

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And the initial claims numbers show no signs of recovery in the job market, with initial claims remaining excessively high, at 422,000, though the 4-week moving average did fall by 14K to 425,500, and continuing and emergency/extended claims were basically flat.

So, the employment numbers are crap, and stuck in a no-recovery “sweet spot,” and it looks like the real estate market is still crashing, a rebound in manufacturing would take years for the capital to be assembled and constructed, and we still have Wall Street sitting athwart our economy, extracting its unearned vigorish that saps both resources and intellect from productive activity.

And Still, They Blather About the Deficit

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ADP’s private payroll report showed an increase of only 38,000 in May, which, when you consider the obvious cuts in state and local payrolls, and lord knows what in the non-profit sector, means that we are looking about a decline in the workforce if the federal numbers come close to matching this report.

Additionally, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence report fell, and auto sales fell for all the major auto manufacturers.

And still the Democrats are buying into the Republican meme that our problem is the deficit.

To quote Robin Williams, “Shazbat!”

Not a Good Economic News Day

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First, initial jobless claims jumped unexpectedly,with initial claims unexpectedly rising to 424,000, though the less noisy 4-week moving average fell slightly, as did continuing and extended claims.

Additionally, the revised 1st quarter GDP numbers missed expectations, with weak consumer spending being much of the shortfall.

With no one in Washington talking about anything besides austerity and cuts, this is going to get ugly.

I think that Krugman is right when he worries that this might be shaping up to be a 3 depression, one more in the vein of the Long Depression of 1873-1890 than the shorter, but more intense Great Depression of the 1930s.

Still Not Enough

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The monthly jobs report is out, and 244,000 non-farm payroll jobs were added last month, which is better than recent history, but still means that we would be over 8½ years away from the already anemic job market that existed in 2008. (8 million jobs lost, natural growth of the labor force is about q75K, so we have about 70k in job “claw back” this month.

Conversely, the unemployment rate actually rose to 9.0%, but this was not because of more entering the workforce, but fewer jobs reported in that study:

Some readers have asked whether the unemployment rate can rise even as employment is growing because more people start looking for work — and thus count as officially unemployed. Theoretically, the answer is yes. This does happen sometimes. But it didn’t happen in April. The unemployment rate rose last month because the household survey showed a decline of 190,000 jobs, not because of a surge in job seekers. That’s why there is no way to reconcile last month’s results of the household survey and employer survey. They make sense only in the context of previous months.

So, your mileage may vary on all of this.

Today’s results are either better than expected but still crappy, or somewhat worse than that.

Great Googly Moogly!

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H/t Wall Street Pit for the graph Pr0n

It’s jobless Thursday, and the numbers are brutal.

It’s back in the 450-485K sweet spot that it hung about for most of last year.

They expected it to fall by about 30K to around 400K, but it rose by 43,000 to 473,000, and the less volatile 4-week moving average rose by 22,250 to 431,250.

Continuing claims rose by 74,000 to 3.73 million, though emergency and extended claims fell by 42,900 to 4.12 million, though in the case of the latter, I do not know how much of this is just the “99ers” exhausting their benefits.

Obama should be running around like his hair is on fire over this report, but he should have been doing that over much of the past year with real unemployment (U-6) staying well over 15%, but because the Banksters are back to paying themselves big bonuses, no one in DC seems to give a damn.

Much more of this, and Sarah Palin will be sworn in as president the day that I make aliyah to Israel.

Economics Update

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It’s Jobless Thursday, and initial claim hit a 3 month high, 429 K, with the 4-week moving average rising, though continuing and extended claims fell.

The numbers have been disappointing, which is not surprising, since the economy grew at an anemic 1.8% annual rate in the 1st quarter.

The problem is that too many people in power (see Geithner, Timothy, for one) think that the economy is recovering fine because the banksters are making lots of money, so they are concerned about the deficit and inflation, as evidenced by this story with its hand wringing about inflation rising, but even though it’s still well under the 2% (I would argue for 6% right now) that the Fed says that we need.

BTW, if you want to read it, here is the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee statement for you to read.

Economics Update

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So, the BLS is reporting that job openings rose rapidly in February.

Looking at the ratio of jobs to the unemployed (see graph pr0n), there has definitely been some improvement, but first, it’s still a pretty crappy number, and second, workforce participation is down, so this number is partially an artifact of that.

We also saw retail sales rise and a moderately good beige book from the Fed, though the former has partially been driven by increased gasoline prices.

What worries me, particularly with the deficit cutting fever out there, is the fact that Gallup Economic Confidence Index hit a low for the year.

Economics Update

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It’s Jobless Thursday, and initial unemployment claims fell by 10,000 to 382,000, with the 4-week moving average of initial claims, continuing claims, and emergency claims falling as well.

When juxtaposed with stronger than expected retail sales figures for March, the economic news is generally pertty good, though the fact that home prices continue to crater, falling for the 7th straight month, indicates that real estate is not done with its correction.

Fox Fires Glen Beck

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His TV show contract will not be renewed in December, and the definitive word on this comes from the Grauniad,* “Glenn Beck will be missed after he leaves Fox News – by satirists.”

I guess cratering ratings, and fleeing sponsors mean something, even to Roger Ailes’ Fox News.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

Last Week’s Employment Data

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Employment-Population ratio h/t Paul Krugman

So the federal unemployment numbers came out on Friday, and employment rose by 216,000 and the unemployment rate fell to 8.8%.

This is good news, employment actually rose by more than the natural growth of the workforce, about 175K, but this still means that it would take about 13 years for the 8 million people who have lost jobs to become employed again.

When one looks at the employment population ratio (see graph Pr0n) and you can see that it  has the lowest that it has been done in a decade, so a lot of the falling unemployment numbers are people leaving the workforce, whether it is early retirement, going on disability, or just giving up.

It’s still basically a jobless “recovery”.

If You Want to Go Postal at Work, Follow the Example of the Indians

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And I mean East Indians, not American Indians.

You see, they don’t go after their cow-orkers, they go after their boss, as in this case where they fired a member of senior management:

Indian police have detained two people after an angry mob of sacked steel workers burned to death a senior executive.

After learning they were laid off, about a dozen workers attacked a 4×4 vehicle carrying Radhey Shyam Roy as he was leaving the factory in eastern Orissa state on Thursday.

They doused it with petrol and set it ablaze, said police Superintendent Ajay Kumar Sarangi.

Needless to say, I do not endors violence against employers, even senior managers, but the fear of such violence does appear to be the only way to restrain their behavior, given that the moneyed class is pretty much above the law in most of the world, including the good old USA.

H/t JR at Stellar Parthenon.

Economics Update for the Week

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The news has been good this week.

First, the jobless rate rate fell to below 9% for the first time in about 2 years, and initial unemployment claims fell to a roughly two year low as well.

Note that while the improvement in the labor force was good, 193,000 that rate means that something like 7 more years would be required to reach something approaching a normal employment picture.

Additionally, productivity rose strongly in the 4th quarter, while the Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing and Non-Manufacturing indices both rose strongly.

The only real question is whether the pain caucus calling for government austerity will screw this all up by cutting government spending, and possibly tightening monetary policy, too soon.

Not Enough Bullets

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RBS bankers get £950m in bonuses despite £1.1bn loss:

More than 100 bankers at Royal Bank of Scotland were paid more than £1m last year and total bonus payouts reached nearly £1bn – even though the bailed-out bank reported losses of £1.1bn for 2010.

The chairman, Sir Philip Hampton, said the number of millionaires was lower than a year ago and said a quarter of the group’s 18,700 investment bankers would not receive a bonus from the £950m payout pool agreed with UK Financial Investments, which controls the taxpayer’s 83% stake in the bank. Unions were baffled that any bankers were getting bonuses.

The unions are not the only ones who are baffled.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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Well, it’s Jobless Thursday, and the initial unemployment claims numbers are good, they fell to 383,000, a 36,000 drop, with the less volatile 4-week moving average falling to 415,000 from 431,000, and continuing claims fell by 49K to 3.89 million, though extended and emergency claims rose by 84K to 4.64 million.

I hope that this is a part of a trend, but much of this may be driven by the extreme weather that we have seen recently, which has the effect of delaying people trying to get to the unemployment offices.

Of particular concern is the rising emergency and extended claims, because there are large numbers of people, the so-called “99-ers” who have run out of benefits completely, and are so not caught in any of these numbers.

Economics Update

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It’s not a good week for employment.

Initial unemployment claims rose by 51,000 to 454,000, people are talking about snow doing this, but I’m inclined believe that the weather had less to do with this than the underlying weakness in the economy.

The less volatile 4 week moving average rose by 15,750 to 428,750, and continuing claims rose by 94K to 3.99 million, and emergency claims fell by 98K to 4.62 million, though a lot of that last number dropping are people simply running out of benefits completely.

The Federal Reserve is still concerned about such thing, as the latest Federal Open Market Committee statement, which maintains its concerns as well as their quantitative easing (printing money) policy.