I’ve always wondered who makes investment decisions based on data that has been reasonably* estimated for weeks.

*If you buy the data

Link

The unemployment rate rose from 6.8% in November to 7.2% in December, the highest rate in almost 16 years, and an increase of 2.3 points since the recession started in December 2007, when the unemployment rate was 4.9%. Over the past 12 months, 3.5 million workers have been added to the jobless rolls. There are now 11.1 million unemployed workers in this country.

More than one in eight workers in the United States–over 21 million people–is now either unemployed or underemployed.

But the real news isn’t that the large job loss numbers are a surprise, but WHY the Bush team and Congress has done next to nothing in 2008 to anticipate the worsening jobs situation and get programs working by NOW!

All the politicians seem to have put all their fate in letting Paulson & Bernanke hand out money to failed corporations, praying and hoping that would help the economy turn around (which it has not).

Now we sit awaiting the inauguration of Obama and the formulation of another stimulus plan that is going to do something (no one seems sure exactly what yet). Even once some plan is produced, passed by Congress and signed by the president, it will take more months afterward to deploy the monies allocated into the economy.

I also second “ben22’s” comment about the prospects of brokers (and other white-collar) workers being able to obtain or even do work in the anticipated infrastructure expansion, which seems to be the primary focus of published plans.

Bruce in Tn Says: “Consumer credit shrank at 16 TIMES …. a capitalist system lives on credit”
don’t worry to much … the United States Government is taking care of that slow spending … well – maybe worry is what we should do. (cause I’m in favor of the Obama $850 billion rescue plan).

And I must admit – I don’t understand what happens to that trade debt at the end of the year. Does it move to the US Government balance sheet of dues? Or do we need to add up years and years of those trade deficits for the true figure?

fyi from Wiki “The US trade deficit hit a record high of 817.3 billion dollars in 2006, up from 767.5 billion dollars in 2005.”

* from: http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/ticker_home.asp

Among other failings of the theory of free market capitalism: it requires that people know how to interpret data correctly — i.e. understand what the data are and what they mean. You can’t possibly be telling me that people draw confused conclusions from data can you? Conclusions that depend on preconcieved biases and non-linear relationships?

People Do.

Barry, I know you realize how many of the sycophants, pundits and talking heads are being paid to produce insightful, opinionated output, so they have to say something. Most of the time preparing that output is spent on devising something unique about the same data everyone else has and to make it look like they are the next great financial/economic wizard of the world. If the next set of layoffs would just focus on those sycophants, pundits and talking heads who contribute nothing of value, you would see a shocking number, larger than any company’s firings so far, and it would be the largest spike of this whole down-economy.

Did you buy any TBT?, I told you I was legging in a month ago, I’ve done all my buying. You warned the charts said 36, it dipped just below that. If you caught that you’ve done quite well so congrats.

In December, the number of persons who worked part time for economic reasons (some-times referred to as involuntary part-time workers) continued to increase, reaching 8.0 million. The number of such workers rose by 3.4 million over the past 12 months. This category includes persons who would like to work full time but were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find full-time jobs.

Sounds pretty much like “growth” is just around the corner.