krogias

Obviously there is a pretty bad discrepancy between those numbers in this morning's edition of blowing sunshine up your skirt from the Ministry of Truth. current employment report Given the size of the country, it SHOULD take 600k jobs to move the rate that much so obviously there's a problem here. How did this happen? Dig a bit deeper and you'll see that they simply defined 504k out of the labor force from December to January and rounding did the rest. Wave a wand and define those people out of existence. If they don't exist, they can't be unemployed now can they? If you look at the chart, you'll see that they did the same thing in December from November. In that case only 260k unemployed people disappeared from the statistics. There is a clear and systemic effort to deceive the public about the state of the economy and it's getting worse. latest household data But there's is an even bigger deception in the numbers that helps to reveal the systemic frau...

This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics release triggered news report to put up a huge headline: 431,000 Jobs Added in May That sound impressive on the surface but the reality is much less than it seems. When you dig down into the numbers you can see just just how little really is there. First, the Census Bureau hired 411,000 temporary workers who were counted as part of the 431,000. The BLS claims 41,000 private-sector jobs were created, with the discrepancy likely coming from net layoffs at state and local levels of government. Let's drill down a bit farther and take a look at the Birth-Death model that we have written about before. When we look there, note that the "model" has added 215,000 private-sector jobs for May. By backing out this estimate , we can conclude that the actual survey measured a net loss of 174,000 jobs in the real economy. We can also dissect the Unemployment Rate in the same fashion. This statistic is based on the Household Survey, w...

It's been a while since I've had the time to add to the blog. Thanks to everyone for their patience and hopefully it was worth the wait. Sometimes changes occur occur quickly and other times they seem to happen in geologic time. The later are usually referred to as secular changes and the former as cyclical, at varying degrees of trend. The distinction is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the perspective of the observer. Being admittedly human ourselves, we will generally refer to a trend playing out over a generation or longer as secular but many brilliant minds will refer to even longer-term trends as cyclical - such as the Kondratieff Wave Cycle. With that definition in mind let's move on to the subject of today's blog entry. The Big Shift Over the last two generations we have seen an enormous shift in social attitudes and structure, with women and especially married women entering the job market. This shows up in many ways in the labor statistics but the most stable...

This weekend we would like to take a look back at the economic contraction that the talking heads would have you believe is already over. Of course there is no way that it true. The extreme deficit spending we referred to in Federal Funhouse could result in a short euphoria before the creditors pull the plug - just like maxing out your credit cards before declaring bankruptcy. But the real economy is in horrible shape and nowhere is this more apparent than in the labor market. Today's critical data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Their unemployment data released Friday was loudly trumpeted as good news when all it really said is we're bleeding to death a little slower. Others have commented on and analyzed this data so we'd like to take a longer view of things - examining the size of the pool of blood on the ground as it were. We're going to use the BLS monthly data for the last two years. Note that at the end of 2007, the potential labor pool (civil...

It appears that the abused average American has finally had enough. Target reported that Christmas sales were very weak and lowered their revenue growth numbers for December quite a bit. Add in the margin pressure from discounting and earnings in that sector should be a mess. The problems seem to be widespread and for once, stocks actually seem to be reacting to obvious fundamental problems. This should really be no surprise at all but sadly, equities have ignored fundamentals for so long that it's a shock when reality intrudes on the feeding frenzy. Here at Financial Jenga, we've been documenting the many pressures facing consumers for some time now. Housing and mortgage debt were covered in Where to Start? We wrote about the deteriorating employment situation and failure of government statistics to reflect it in Behind the Numbers . The collapse of personal savings and explosion of total household debt was the theme of First Principles . Why is anyone surprised that a cons...

Today we hear that 4,000 fewer people had jobs in the USA in August than in July. Don't believe that - the losses are much worse than just 4k. The numbers of losses have just gotten too big for the statistical "adjustments" to hide. The actual employer survey data showed job losses throughout the second quarter and minimal gains in the first quarter. The Birth/Death Model added 120k jobs in August. That is the assumed net addition from startup businesses, less the losses from existing firms folding. Does anybody actually believe that number should be positive instead of negative given the number of small business failures? The actual employer survey showed 124k losses. The reality is likely to be worse than that once the actual net jobs from business startups and failures is measured. The household survey has been flashing danger even longer. No jobs created since November of last year. August household survey shows 316k jobs lost. The unemployment number stay...