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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: dario73 on August 05, 2011, 06:09:51 AM
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Employers Add 117K Jobs, Releasing Market Tension After Sell-Off
Published August 05, 2011
| Associated Press
Print Email Share Comments Text Size WASHINGTON – Hiring picked up slightly in July and the unemployment rate dipped to 9.1 percent, an optimistic sign after the worst day on Wall Street in nearly three years.
The Labor Department says employers added 117,000 jobs last month. That's an improvement from the past two months.
The mild gain may ease investors' concerns after the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted more than 500 points over concerns that the U.S. may be entering another recession.
Still, the economy needs twice as many net jobs per month to rapidly reduce unemployment. The rate has topped 9 percent in every month except two since the recession officially ended in June 2009.
The unemployment rate fell partly because some unemployed workers stopped looking for work. That means they are no longer counted as unemployed.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/08/05/employers-add-117k-jobs-releasing-market-tension-after-sell-off/
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Terrible. Just terrible.
Next month's report will correct the UE rate to 9.3%. Unless the unemployed are no longer going to be counted.
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Labor particpation rate dropped to lowest on record.
They dropped 200k out of the labor pool, etc.
Its a bogus number entirely. More lies from the govt.
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Labor particpation rate dropped to lowest on record.
They dropped 200k out of the labor pool, etc.
Its a bogus number entirely. More lies from the govt.
Not lies, the numbers are there from everyone to see. It's more of a lie of omission as the LFP rate etc aren't spouted by the media/govt complex.
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You'd all be surprised how many unemployed people AREN'T actually looking for work though...
I know a lot of guys that see UE as an extended vacation.
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Labor participation rate is all you need to know.
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I thought the recession never ended? ???
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Average Length Of Unemployment Surges To New All Time Record 40.4 Weeks
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/05/2011 09:54 -0400
www.zerohedge.com
Unemployment
We already learned that the one biggest red flag in unemployment data had been raised when we found that the labor force participation rate was the lowest since 1984. Now we find that the other critical data point: average length of unemployment, just hit a new all time high of 40.4 weeks in July, up from the previous record of 39.9 in June. Someone should tell the average American who is rapidly approaching one year in average unemployment that the stock market soared on good payroll news. They will be delighted.
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>:(
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>:(
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Unemployment Report August: “Discouraging” (200,000 Workers Drop Out Discouraged Last Month)
Business Insider ^ | Aug. 5, 2011, 10:13 AM | Larry Doyle
...The labor participation rate continues to decline. This measure of people who are either employed or actively looking for work declined last month from 64.1% to 63.9%. Why? People are so discouraged that they have given up looking for work.
Please scroll to the bottom of the report to which I linked. We witness that the number of discouraged workers rose from 982,000 in June (822,ooo in May) to a whopping 1,119,000 last month.
We had an increase of 137,000 discouraged workers last month and 297,000 discouraged workers over the last two months. Juxtapose those figures next to the increase in the non-farm payroll of 117,000 workers last month.
No, we did not hit a triple with this report. In fact, when we incorporate the discouraged workers into our review my ‘sense on cents’ indicates to me that our situation actually worsened.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
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More to be done
W.H. on data: 'Better than expected'
By MATT NEGRIN | 08/05/11 11:05 AM
W.H. on data: 'Better than expected'Please enter your e-mailInvalid e-mailYour E-mail Please enter a valid e-mailInvalid e-mailFriends E-mail(s) Separate emails with a comma. Maximum of 5 emails allowed. Message Submit Cancel EmailPrint
The unemployment rate dipped to 9.1 percent. AP Photo
Close The jobs report is in: The unemployment rate dipped to 9.1 percent, and the economy added 117,000 jobs in July, the government says.
President Obama is likely to mention the news in a short while as he speaks at Washington's Navy Yard.
Meanwhile, Obama's outgoing economic adviser Austan Goolsbee writes: "While the better than expected report is welcome news, the unemployment rate remains unacceptably high and faster growth is needed to replace the jobs lost in the downturn. Bipartisan action is needed to help the private sector and the economy grow – such as measures to extend both the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance, as well as passing the pending free trade agreements with re-employment assistance for displaced workers, the patent reform bill, and a bipartisan infrastructure bill to help put Americans back to work. This week we averted an economic catastrophe by avoiding a default and putting in place an important down payment on long term deficit reduction. We will continue to work with Congress to build on these efforts to achieve a broader balanced deficit reduction agreement that instills confidence and allows us to live within our means without shortchanging future growth."
________________________ ___________
FUCKING FAIL
RESIGN NOW YOU COMMIE POFS!
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Job Numbers Go From Grim to Ghastly
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/mzuckerman/articles/2011/08/04/job-numbers-go-from-grim-to-ghastly_print.html
The economic pain is intensified as more and more of the unemployed are no longer receiving regular jobless benefits
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
Posted: August 4, 2011
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Washington, Wall Street, and the business world were astounded and dismayed by the dismal employment statistics recently put forth by the government. We need 125,000 jobs every month just to account for people entering the workforce, but the numbers show only 18,000 more jobs in June and 25,000 in May. And the June numbers included the assumption that 131,000 net jobs were created by newly formed companies, a generous assumption that has proved to be consistently overstated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the past three years. Equally concerning is that the underlying employment numbers are even worse than Washington's gloss.
[Check out the new U.S. News Weekly iPad app.]
Almost ignored by the press is the fact that full-time employment dropped by 435,000 in the last month and, over the past three months, it is down by a combined total of 868,000 jobs. There has been a 3 percent increase in the number of people working part time, but full-time employment has been down 0.5 percent for the full year. In fact, all of the net job increases since President Obama came into office were part-time employees and not full-time employees, a critical distinction. All of this is in the context of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in the history of this country.
This is scarily abnormal. We are 24 months into a recovery. Normally we'd be enjoying about 180,000 more jobs a month. We have only a tenth of that. We have lost over 8.5 million jobs in the Great Recession, and only 1.5 million have returned; contrast that to a normal recovery, where all job losses have been recovered two years into a recovery. The total ranks of the unemployed jumped 173,000 and crossed over the 14 million mark for the first time this year.
[Check out a roundup of political cartoons on the economy]
The scale of the great job famine is exemplified by the number of people 16 years of age and over who are at work or actively seeking it, the so-called labor participation rate. In 2009, when Obama's economic advisers projected that his stimulus program would prevent unemployment from exceeding 8 percent, the labor force participation rate was 66.2 percent. By that measure, the unemployment rate would now be 12 percent.
This June, the labor participation rate had fallen to 64.1 percent because over 3 million people had given up looking. That is the reason the unemployment rate is proclaimed at the ghastly 9.2 percent instead of that even more ghastly, but more real, 12 percent.
There is another measure of the jobless rate that is perhaps even more shocking: U-6. It counts the number of people who have applied for a job in the last six months rather than just in the last four weeks. This is the more relevant gauge of unemployment, since the average length of unemployment is now 39.9 weeks, the longest since record-keeping began in 1948. People who are out of work for 40 weeks do not apply for a job every four weeks. The rate for these longer-term seekers has jumped to a five-month high of 16.2 percent. It also includes 8.6 million involuntary part-timers—those who want to work full time—which is double the historical norm. A stunning 25 million people are out of work, according to the U-6 measure of unemployment.
[See a slide show of the 10 best cities to find a job.]
To date, 6.3 million have been out of work for over six months, and 4 million have been unemployed for more than 12 months. Lose your job and it will take an average of nine months to find one. Twenty-eight million people are in jobs they would have quit under normal conditions. There are seven people vying for every job opening, compared to the normal ratio of closer to three applicants for every opening. The number of unemployed represented by people out of work for less than five weeks jumped 15.5 percent in June to 3.1 million, a figure not seen since October 2009, when the economy was in the depths of this recession. This is a symptom of the propensity of companies to reduce their employment.
The prospects remain bleak. Since the beginning of February, jobless claims have been above 400,000 almost every week. Until this weekly figure falls below 400,000, we cannot expect to put a dent in the unemployment rate. To make a real difference, the economy needs to crank out 200,000 to 250,000 jobs a month, and we are very far from that number. The great American job machine is breaking down.
The economic pain is intensified as more and more of the unemployed are no longer receiving regular jobless benefits. Last month, some 43,000 lost them. Add in all the emergency and extended programs that have expired and you have over a million workers who have lost their benefits in the past year.
Nor is this unemployment temporary. About a quarter of those looking for work—some 3.5 million—are apparently not qualified for the jobs that are open. The McKinsey Global Institute recently surveyed 2,000 firms and found that 40 percent had positions open at least six months for lack of suitable candidates. This is important because the likelihood of finding a job shrinks as the duration of unemployment rises. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that a person who is long-term unemployed this month has a 1 in 10 chance of finding a job next month because their networks, skills, and confidence have faded along with the funds for searching or relocation. They are three times less likely to find work than the recently redundant.
[See a slide show of the 10 cities with highest real income.]
It is the young who suffer the most, for they make up some 25 percent of the current unemployed population. Not to mention the 23 percent who have given up searching. These rates approach levels reached only in the Great Depression and put an entire generation of workers at risk. Less educated workers are having an especially difficult time. The BLS Household Survey indicates that college graduates have nailed 105,000 jobs over the past two months, while those without at least a bachelor's degree have lost over 350,000. There is no scrap of cheer either in the McKinsey Global Institute study on long-term job prospects. It concludes: "Only in the most optimistic scenario will the United States return to full employment before 2020. Achieving this outcome will require sustained demand growth, rising U.S. competitiveness in a global economy, and better matching of U.S. workers to jobs."
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has the same glum outlook. Only 19 percent of small business executives indicate they will expand their workforce in the next year. Forty-one percent of small business owners see the economic climate worsening in 2012, compared to 29 percent who think things will get better. Go back to 2006-07 for what we hoped would be happening now. In the typically churning job environment we had then, American firms were hiring about 5.5 million workers per month. Now the hiring is down to about 4 million a month or less.
Instead of the macroeconomic approach of increasing demand, which a Republican Congress won't enact anyway, there are a number of more job-focused ideas of varying potential. There's the payroll tax holiday for a year for employees and a year's exemption for employers from making contributions for newly hired workers. This reduction in taxes (normally 6.2 percent of salary, paid both by employers and employees) would increase take-home pay and make it less expensive to hire additional workers. But even lower salaries today are not sufficient to induce employers to add to their employee base in adequate numbers.
[See a slide show of the 10 cities with the lowest real income.]
Former President Bill Clinton, in a recent Newsweek article, suggested a temporary waiver of environmental regulations so that large-scale infrastructure programs could be approved quickly. This idea of a standby set of approvals, whereby infrastructure programs would be shovel-ready, has long been recommended but to date has been ignored by the administration. A related idea is that the government temporarily suspend the Davis-Bacon Act. It's a political rather than economic measure requiring public works projects to pay the prevailing wage, which in turn boosts labor costs and thus deters new projects. Given the number of people unemployed because of the collapse of housing starts, this may be the fastest way to kick off major new public works projects.
Another proposal would be to provide every city in America with funds to improve their streets. Washington could agree to match 50 percent of the amount each city has spent on its streets averaged over the last two years. No regulation or environmental constraint would interfere with the immediate need to get construction jobs going, since these projects would involve existing city streets.
Similarly, we must remove obstacles to start-ups, especially high-tech entrepreneurial start-ups. They are the major source of new employment, but all manner of obstacles exist—not least patent delays and overlapping or conflicting land use regulations. According to an International Finance Corp. report, the United States now ranks 27th on the ease of getting a construction permit. We are even behind Saudi Arabia. A commission should be formed to put forth standardized regulations to help local communities adapt to our predicament.
We can't just keep hoping. We have just experienced the first back-to-back monthly decline in inflation-adjusted consumer spending in the last two years, and this makes up 70 percent of our economy. There is a whole raft of headwinds for the jobless millions: anticipated cutbacks in federal fiscal support; further cutbacks because of deficits in state and local government budgets; the continuing weakness in the housing market, which is off some 75 percent in new construction; the continuation of debt reduction by nervous American families as they increase their savings rate; the increase in gasoline and food prices; and a dramatic decline in consumer confidence to the lowest levels since World War II.
Are we looking at a second lost decade in this century, after the first decade saw all the jobs created in that decade wiped out by the Great Recession? In every decade since the end of World War II, we added a net of 10 million to 20 million jobs to our economy. And we still have to worry about a swooning economy and a double-dip recession, since every recession we've had was ushered in by a rise in the unemployment rate of 0.5 percent. We are already up 0.4 percent.
There is a general erosion of confidence in the Obama administration, compounded by the deficiencies in our political leadership on deficit contraction and the debt ceiling. It brings to mind that when politicians see a light at the end of the tunnel, they always think they can buy a longer tunnel.
•See photos of the Obamas behind the scenes.
•See editorial cartoons about President Obama.
•See who's been visiting the White House.
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Beneath Jobs Report Surface Lies Some Ugly Truths
CNBC ^ | 5 Aug 2011 | Jeff Cox
Let’s start with the reality that fewer people actually were working in July than in June.
According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdown, there were 139,296,000 people working in July, compared to 139,334,000 the month before. That’s actually a drop of 2.7 percent.
But the job creation number was positive and the unemployment rate went down, right? So how does that work?
It’s a product of something the government calls “discouraged workers,” or those who were unemployed but not out looking for work during the reporting period.
This is where the numbers showed a really big spike—up from 982,000 to 1.119 million, a difference of 137,000 or a 14 percent increase. These folks are generally not included in the government’s various job measures.
So the drop in the unemployment rate is fairly illusory—stick all those people back in the workforce and you wipe out the job creation and the drop in unemployment.
For once, some of the government’s other tools of economic voodoo didn’t help the count.
The vaunted birth-death model, a byzantine approximation of business creation and failure, actually subtracted 18,000 from the total job creation after a five-month run where it added a total of 741,000 positions to the count.
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The average duration of unemployment rose for the third straight month and is now at a record 40.4 weeks—about 10 months and now double where it was when President Obama took office in January 2009. The total number unemployed for more than half a year now stands at 6.18 million, 130 percent higher than when the president’s term began.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
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Do you guys understand how fucked we are?
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Beneath Jobs Report Surface Lies Some Ugly Truths
CNBC ^ | 5 Aug 2011 | Jeff Cox
Let’s start with the reality that fewer people actually were working in July than in June.
According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdown, there were 139,296,000 people working in July, compared to 139,334,000 the month before. That’s actually a drop of 2.7 percent.
But the job creation number was positive and the unemployment rate went down, right? So how does that work?
It’s a product of something the government calls “discouraged workers,” or those who were unemployed but not out looking for work during the reporting period.
This is where the numbers showed a really big spike—up from 982,000 to 1.119 million, a difference of 137,000 or a 14 percent increase. These folks are generally not included in the government’s various job measures.
So the drop in the unemployment rate is fairly illusory—stick all those people back in the workforce and you wipe out the job creation and the drop in unemployment.
For once, some of the government’s other tools of economic voodoo didn’t help the count.
The vaunted birth-death model, a byzantine approximation of business creation and failure, actually subtracted 18,000 from the total job creation after a five-month run where it added a total of 741,000 positions to the count.
...
The average duration of unemployment rose for the third straight month and is now at a record 40.4 weeks—about 10 months and now double where it was when President Obama took office in January 2009. The total number unemployed for more than half a year now stands at 6.18 million, 130 percent higher than when the president’s term began.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
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Do you guys understand how fucked we are?
Rush cited an article, claiming that if the labor force were the same size today that it was when Obama first took office, unemployment would actually be 11.7%.