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While employment rose by 160,000 jobs in July, the overall unemployment rate remained at 8.3%.1 “Hurrah” is not the correct response to these data. (“Hurrah” is the response seen the most in the MSM.) First, the trends: The payrolls chart (right) reveals a largely flat trend for the past year, which says that job [...] Recent economic data, and especially today’s unemployment numbers reveal the powerlessness of the Fed in the face of underlying economic problems that they fail to understand. The Fed has tried every trick in the book for the past 4 years to revive the economy only to see it continue to weaken. Unfortunately they only know [...] New jobless claims continued their see-saw trend, this week heading down, slightly, to 367,000 new claims vs. 368,000 the week before. Here is the trend: Last week’s employment report was much more negative in that unemployment actually rose, if you consider the shrinking labor force because of labor dropouts–people who gave up looking. [...] With today’s weak employment numbers, most economists are looking for reasons to excuse this negative trend rather than trying understand it. They blame it on the warm winter weather, or “same thing as last Spring,” or “consolidation”, anything but what is really happening in the economy. You need to look at employment in the context of [...] The employment data from the BLS this morning shocked a lot of economists and writers because it came in much lower than expected. The consensus was for around 201,000 new jobs (February was +240,000), but the report came in at only 120,000. Immediately came the expected headlines: All of the above articles [...] There was some better news on the unemployment situation today as the BLS reportedthat the unemployment rate had dropped to 8.6% from 9.0% in November. (See yesterday’s article, “Another ‘Unexpected’ Unemployment Report.”) The highlight numbers improved but if one digs a little deeper the overall jobs situation in America remains relatively unchanged. While the report [...] In case you were hiding in your bunker today waiting for President Obama’s jobs speech you might have missed today’s jobs report which continues to be negative. It measures new claims for unemployment insurance: Jobless claims continue to hold steady, up 2,000 to 414,000 in the September 3 week (prior week revised 3,000 higher to [...] The Jobs and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report came in with a disappointing increase in initial claims for unemployment for February, 2011. This is the highest level (412,000) since February 12, 2011. This data has been flattening for the past month. Initial unemployment claims jumped 27,000 in the April 9 week to a much higher-than-expected [...] This morning’s BLS job reports came out showing unemployment down from 9.8% to 9.4%: What was disappointing to the market was that nonfarm payrolls were only up 103,000, well below the consensus expectation of 160,000 new jobs. The decline in unemployment is seen as an aberration because it was due in part to a drop [...] |
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