BLS Report | The Daily Capitalist

May Jobs Report Is 'Disappointing'

President Obama has now become a professional economist, because like most professional economists his unemployment forecast was wrong.

While the headline from the Wall Street Journal this morning was “Census Hiring Bolsters U.S. Payrolls,” nothing could be farther from the truth. Private sector job growth in May was anemic, coming in at only 41,000. The total number of new jobs was 431,000, but temporary Census Bureau hiring accounted for 411,000 of those jobs. Note that the difference between the two numbers doesn’t add up because net government employment was less than that because state and local governments shed jobs. [I now see that the latest online edition of the Journal has re-entitled their story, "US Private Sector Added Few Jobs In May."]

The consensus among economists surveyed by the Journal and Bloomberg expected 515,000 and 536,000, respectively.

“Job growth is going to be anemic,” said Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California.

“Remember, it requires 150,000 to 200,000 jobs in order to reduce that unemployment rate, which is a key focus for the administration,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio’s Tom Keene on “Bloomberg on the Economy.” … Continue reading May Jobs Report Is ‘Disappointing’

National Unemployment Increases To 9.9%

The BLS just came out with their April state and regional unemployment/employment data:

Regional and state unemployment rates were generally little changed or slightly lower in April. Thirty four states and the District of Columbia recorded unemployment rate decreases, 6 states had increases,and 10 states had no change, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [...]

Employment vs. Unemployment

Several things are happening with unemployment which are interesting and indicative of where we are in the business cycle.

There is no question that private sector jobs (nonfarm payrolls) are increasing. They were up by 231,000 jobs in the BLS’s April report.

Courtesy Wall Street Journal

While government jobs upped the numbers to 290,000 you can’t count those jobs in determining whether we are in a recovery. And many government jobs (66,000) were Census jobs that are only temporary anyway. Non-federal government employment actually dropped as states and municipalities cut back.

Strength was seen in: professional and business services, up 80,000; manufacturing, up 44,000; leisure and hospitality, up 45,000; education and health services, up 35,000; construction, up 14,000. Manufacturing has added 101,000 jobs since December.

To put this in perspective, in the past two year we have lost 8.5 million jobs according to the BLS, more than half of today’s total unemployed. In the first four months of 2010 we’ve averaged 143,000 new jobs a month.

Employment recovery is good. Unemployment is a different thing. New jobs don’t account for the total labor workforce. People come and go from the labor pool for a variety of reasons. If more people are looking for jobs after, say having given up looking, the unemployment totals can go up. This is what happened in April.

… Continue reading Employment vs. Unemployment

Unemployment Falls to 9.7% (Did it Really?)

The employment numbers for January 2010 came out today and the headline was that unemployment dropped from 10% to 9.7%. This is a significant event because we all want to see employment grow. My conclusion from reading the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is that it’s very hard to tell if this [...]