Employment Chart Roundup
By Barry Ritholtz - February 8th, 2010, 6:47AM
Here are 10 of the most informative charts I’ve seen regarding Friday’s NFP:
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Click for bigger (and in some cases, ginormous) charts
No Job Gains for a Decade
Bianco Research
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Percentage Job Loss form Recession Start
Chart of the Day
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Cumulative Job Losses
Bianco Research
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Unemployment Rate — Recessionary Peaks
The Chart Store
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Job Losses 3 Month Moving Average
Economix
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U3, U6 Unemployment Rates
Econompicdata
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Temporary Help Situation
Bruce Steinberg
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Using Unemployment Levels to Date Recessions
The Chart Store
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Job Losses in Manufacturing
The Chart Store
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Months to Recover Job Losses, Post WW2 Recessions
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February 8th, 2010 at 7:45 am
It would be great to have a summary of when our luminaries called bottoms. Cramer called in Hune 16,2009 for RE, Summers said July/Aug for the whole economy.
This article compares a half dozen states to the PIGS. A very tough situation is rapidly approaching where the unions will either have to take substantial pay & benfits cuts or push the states into BK, unless the US funds the states like they have the banksm but I think the banks have a lock on the US teets
http://seekingalpha.com/article/187051-think-the-pigs-are-in-trouble-these-7-u-s-states
-could-be-heading-for-something-worse?source=article_sb_popular
February 8th, 2010 at 7:59 am
How much have discouraged workers skewed most recent U3 stats?
http://www.scribd.com/full/26493859?access_key=key-1xt0aottpr19lwva172k
February 8th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I’d be really interested to see vertical bars in “Unemployment Rate — Recessionary Peaks” for the dates of the U.S. elections. It might just show how much the governing politicians are prepared to play with the economy, in order to get elected.
February 8th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Shouldn’t these results have put paid to the entire “supply side” theory of economics? A ten year experiment kicked off by the Republicans and cheer-led by George W. Bush and we have nothing but a monstrous black hole of debt to show for the effort. What happened to all of those jobs which employers and firms were supposed to have “created” with the money being given them by the government through the tax cuts? Personally, I think they were all “created” but they happen to have been created in China through those funds flowing immediately offshore beyond the control of the US IRS, which was the purpose of the whole exercise anyway. Anyone hearing a Republican talking point chattering about general tax cuts on high income earners and corporations to “promote” should just snort in derision and follow up with a question about how their experiment failed so catastrophically already and why doubling down would provide results.
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BR: Supply sie traces back to Art Laffer under Rolad Reagan — that make it closer to a 30 year failed experiment
February 8th, 2010 at 9:23 am
@rktbrkr – interesting conclusion, but unions have little to do with it. I live in one of those states and it ain’t unionized.
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There’s a question posed on the manufacturing chart regarding manufacturing job losses — “Is this due to the rapid growth of the Internet, computer power, and increased productivity in emerging economies that results in outsourcing?”
The answer is ‘yes’ and it applies to many more jobs than manufacturing. The Internet has compounded the jobs problem. You don’t hear a lot any more about the “knowledge worker.” The Internet made it possible to move those jobs too — accounting, procurement, hardware and software development, finance, and even marketing. I’m sure there are other examples, I’m just thinking of what I know one company has done.
U.S. workers are not gonna see relief any time soon. It’s too bad we (as a country) decided to transfer the remaining middle class wealth to the rich rather than invest it or save it. How’s that trickle down working now?
February 8th, 2010 at 9:33 am
So now everyone’s going with the summer ’09 recession band?
February 8th, 2010 at 10:14 am
It just doesn’t seem fair to “blame the internet” for our job loss problems, but it is probably asymptomatic of the maturity of this Super Power. We’ve been on top a long time, and there comes a time to move off the top. I had a HR professional tell me back in 2003 that he thought the American worker was pricing himself out of a job. We basically have one retailer in this country in Wal Mart, that forces the hand of manufacturers all over the world, to make them produce for artificially low prices. Combine this with the way the Chinese peg their currency, and there you go.
Every time I think of all the job losses, I think back to 2001, when the US economy first showed those real cracks. I think about how we propped up jobs in this country through debt inflation, and the US home ATM machine. Now, the piper is in town and playing loudly, and there really isn’t much that politicians can do that will greatly effect the employment landscape.
February 8th, 2010 at 10:22 am
BR, I fully concur that the supply side experiment has a thirty year life-span, but it was during the last ten years when the conservative economists had the political levers on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue to push through their dream packages of tax cuts and deregulation and castrating the regulators too. Before the Republican Revolution of 1994, at least we had adults in charge in the Congress, not the children who masquerade as legitimate politicians we have now. The period 1980-2000 was just the precursor, but the last ten years were the full blown accumulation of those policies and we now see how well they can work. They don’t. They lead to the Thunderdome, which is just fine with those who think they’ve got enough money to always call the shots, literally. Didn’t one of their one, in fact, call for head shots (and I ain’t talking video here either) once upon a time?
February 8th, 2010 at 10:32 am
Yes, indeed, supply side failed miserably, or so it is said. But W’s economic policies are hardly an example of “supply-side” economics. Rather they are an example of “free lunch” stupidity, at home and abroad. But that still doesn’t mean that we can tax ourselves to prosperity. No economic system ever has, nor ever will.
It is precisely true that American workers have priced themselves out of jobs. Want to know where the jobs are? Interview a Chinese peasant that left the land his family had ploughed for the last 1,000 years and ask why, and there will be your answer. He’s willing to uproot his life to work for a small fraction of the wage that fat, lazy and contented Americans are willing to get out of bed for.
But the claim that unionism is not a factor is laughable. The PIGS are suffering tremendously at the hands of their public-sector unions, which have, for all intents and purposes, taken over the apparatus of the state, meaning, in effect, that they are indeed trying to tax themselves to prosperity.
But demographics really tells the tale. A growing cohort of aged pensioners needing vast amounts of resources devoted to their care and feeding with nothing of value created in return means that in Europe, the US and Japan, the gig is really already up. The march of history continues, regardless how much those thinking themselves “entitled” prefer to stand athwart it hollering, “stop.”
February 8th, 2010 at 10:38 am
Yes, but we didn’t find out that the 2000s were a lost decade. This makes it Obama’s fault. (Copyright Frank Luntz)
February 8th, 2010 at 10:45 am
You hit the nail on the head Curmudgeon. And the public sector job and pension growth in the US is now in the same boat. Tie all that with exploding/ed private debt, 1/10 the manufacturing base we used to have and practically no savings rate for all but the last of the last 10 years and we are begging for trouble.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Then it sure is a good thing that our demographics points to a reduction in working age people as the baby-boomers begin to retire in large numbers.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:48 am
Eventually we will just have to stop this raping of American society by rich pigs and demanding that all free trade must also be fair trade. If they pay their workers $1/day we add import taxes up to what their products would have cost if produced by Americans with a living wage. Yes stupid little trinkets will cost 10 times as much. But we don’t need their stupid little trinkets if the real price is the loss of American jobs. Yes profits will fall and our big fat billionaires will have to slim down, it’s about time. Like trickle down, free trade was always a scam that simply served as an excuse for allowing the rich to stick it to working people.
February 8th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
@Curmudgeon Americans may be fat and spoiled by a standard of living that was the envy of the world, but they aren’t lazy. You really ought to get out more and talk to the people who serve your needs. I bet you don’t even look them in the eye when you blast past them to whatever task you consider to be so almighty important to your contribution to economic productivity. If your standard of a great employee is someone living in squalor who takes a job for $4 a day, then your long-term business trajectory for America is quite short-sighted. Championing serfdom as a business model for modern-day employees precludes productivity increases, innovation and a consumer base for an economy. It is nothing more than a method of maximizing profit by optimizing exploitation of workers. Why don’t you read a little history about how exploitation of the peasant class worked out historically for the wealthy landowners and nation states ? Guillotines and hangings come to mind.
February 8th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Curmugeon at 10:32:”It is precisely true that American workers have priced themselves out of jobs. Want to know where the jobs are? Interview a Chinese peasant that left the land his family had ploughed for the last 1,000 years and ask why, and there will be your answer. He’s willing to uproot his life to work for a small fraction of the wage that fat, lazy and contented Americans are willing to get out of bed for. ”
I disagree. The problem is not primarily caused by fat, lazy Americans. I think the problem is more caused by the simplification of the cost of goods and raw materials. Sure it’s quite simple for me to say, “If I was a manufacturer, I would go where the cost of labor combined w transport, is lowest and move my operation there. That’s where I can make the most money/profit.” The issue is, sure that is where you can make the most short-term profit, but what about costs to employees (IE healthcare) and costs to environment, ie(massive pollution). The reason the cost of labor are so low is because their people do not care about healthcare and their environment, they are in the early part of their country’s economic growth. If you don’t think that unions and attention to environment won’t happen, you only need to wait a few decades before their population realizes these longer term costs. I am not saying that our attention to a healthy environment and healthy workforce is not overdone, but certainly the costs of these short-term intangibles is worth something.
February 8th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
@miamiocean:
When the Chinese peasant awakens to the reality of his exploitation, if in fact that is his reality, then there might be blood. But don’t be so naive. He doesn’t leave his ancestral lands for a job in the city because he believes it to be exploitative. And so long as the American worker has to compete with him for a job in the internationalized labor markets, then the total cost of employing Americans has to roughly equal the total cost of employing a Chinese peasant.
Which brings me to the next point:
@Init4good:
The Chinese have yet to factor in much of the externalities of their explosive growth, i.e., pollution, worker exploitation, etc. When they do, as they one day must, the relative cost of Chinese labor will increase, thereby making Americans more competitive. In the meantime, what seems like a bad deal for American laborers is in fact a good deal for American consumers. If the Chinese want to get rich raping their land and their laborers for our benefit, we should let them. In the end, we’ll be richer for allowing them the priviledge. Trying to protect jobs that are economically unviable in the circumstances (domestic automobile workers come to mind) will simply make us collectively poorer. We would do better to just allow them to sit idly by (i.e., unemployment insurance, the infamous “jobs bank”) until their employment creates, rather than destroys, value.
February 8th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Curmudgeon; at least you are not shy about your imperialism ;-). Let our ruling class conspire with their ruling class to destroy a decent life for our working class, and turn their countries into toxic wastelands. Unfortunately, in the end even the ruling classes are destroyed by that approach – but I guess you plan on being dead and gone by then so you don’t have to personally face the consequences.
February 8th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Sweet baby jeebus,
First of all, it isn’t the farmer or his wife moving, it’s his expensive daughters. Applying EMH to what happens in a centrally planned economy is, um, “misguided.”
Internal wage arbitrage is easy to manipulate when the PRC can dictate food prices.
February 8th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
@Curmudgeon My apologies for my swipe at you as in the running for the Marie Antoinette Award of the year. I don’t know you nor your interactions with people. I object to your charge that American workers are lazy. I think that is an easy out for people who wish to excuse the destruction of jobs in America as a result of some defect in American workers. There are no doubt lazy workers in the U.S., however the real increase in productivity over the past 20 years in the U.S. does not support that claim. If U.S. workers are so lazy, you would expect productivity to decrease over time.
The world has had a global economy since the 17th century. The world has had low cost (slave) labor for hundreds of years. This is not something new under the sun. What is new is that American companies have ceased taking the long view in business as it relates to the future growth of wealth creation in the U.S. economy. I wish I had more than a passing knowledge in the history of world economies. I can only speak from what makes sense (or not) to me based on my limited understanding. I keep thinking about whether or not Queen Elizabeth would have considered outsourcing her shipbuilding needs to Spain or Portugal if labor in England was more costly. There is an assumption that this age of global economics is an end to imperialism. While there may not be the same historically bold land occupations by foreigners seeking to secure control over limited resources, I can’t help but feel that there are more modern variants with the same dangers.
February 8th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
[...] Employment Chart Roundup (The Big Picture) [...]
February 8th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
at ashpelham2 Says:
February 8th, 2010 at 10:14 am
“It just doesn’t seem fair to “blame the internet” for our job loss problems…”
What about hundred of thousands of jobs lost thanks to illegal downloads ?
1.Photographers making one dollar per picture, or 2. musicians making zero, nada, (music studios closing their doors ) 3. american software developers seeing their work cracked in less than 24 hours, 4.graphic designers not making a living, 4.writers (digital books without copyright, yes the Bailout Nation is one that is in “torrent format”), 5. movie makers and studios cutting budgets, and the list grows everyday.
The lack of regulation of the internet has caused losses in the multimedia industry, and nobody has the political will to stop it. Nicolas Sarkozy it trying to do something, we will see ! I’m not optimistic about it.
February 8th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
China is doomed. If you think that decreasing the marginal cost of labor by forcing labor to the cities is the path the per capita prosperity, then i have a chinese made Obama sweater i’d like to sell you. As technology/productivity increases, the value of a worker, declines relative to the value of the machine. See auto industry for said example. So you need to work smarter, not just throw more slaves at it.
Last time i checked the US dominates the internet, and we may just have 5 billion new customers. It is true that we wasted a few years on this here housing bubble, but don’t worry, we shall recover.
China may put out some gaudy GDP numbers, but rank 100th or so in per capita income (they would jump if their currency floated but oh well). The have structural and GOVT problems that are too numerous to mention, and their own GOVT sponsored real estate bubble. And they import food and raw materials.
Productivity and innovation. That is the holy grail of increasing wealth.
China was the world’s 2nd largest economy in 1900, and they are number 2 again. However they are, as they were then still, not in the top 100 of per capita GDP, as thusly, not very wealthy.
Have they come along way in the last 20 years? hell yes. Ready to go it alone though and “decouple”? Not to my eyes.
Disclaimer: Long the American people.
February 8th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
If as some of you claim tax cuts don’t work, then I hope Obama get all the tax increases from all you rich fat cats. Might as well drain you dry since none of you are creating jobs. Isn’t that what you are claiming now about the tax cuts? Lets keep raising the debt and deficit. Heck, thats got to work much better then what we had under Reagan and Bush. Banana Republic, here we come.
February 8th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Foxmuldar, we’ve seen that tax cuts don’t work when the cuts go to only a thin strata of the society. The rich don’t “create” jobs out of the goodness of their cold adamantine hearts. They might create jobs if some demand exists for whatever they think they can sell. Without that demand, all the tax cuts in the world will create no jobs whatsoever. So, that means that any tax cuts which are enacted should be focused totally on the working and middle classes, with taxes increased on the uber wealthy to make up the difference. Such a policy can’t work worse than the total fiascoes we’ve had under Reagan, Bush Pere and Dubya, where only debt increased for the nation and some thieves rode off into the sunset with bagloads of lucre.
You lament about us becoming a Banana Republic? That happened under Dubya, with the tax cuts for the wealthy and debt burden for everyone else. That’s just what happened in other famous banana republics like Nicaragua under Somoza, Zaire under Mbutu, The Philippines under Marcos and Indonesia under Suharto. You just didn’t notice it happening to us. Some of us did in real time.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:27 pm
Globalisation has been great for MNC’s (As evidenced by record profit margins) but not so great for the people. A fact which is now gaining broader recognition. We are, IMHO, in the early stages of a vast rebalancing of wealth in which living standards in the developing world will rise, offset by a commensurate decline in living standards in the West. IMHO, this process is irreversible. This phenomenon is NOT widely discussed in the West because wide recognition of the facts would result in massive social unrest and demands for introduction of tariffs and controls which are clearly NOT in the best interests of Corporate America. Which IS America now?
February 9th, 2010 at 12:41 am
miamiocean – Excellent points.
February 9th, 2010 at 8:42 am
scharfy: Amen to that!
February 9th, 2010 at 8:46 am
philipat @ 11:27: “We are, IMHO, in the early stages of a vast rebalancing of wealth in which living standards in the developing world will rise, offset by a commensurate decline in living standards in the West. ”
Agree w Part 1: living std in developing world will rise, but not Part 2: at expense of decline in liv stds in west. Our living std in west has not risen in last 15yrs – evidence income & market returns – except for the top .5% weathiest.
February 9th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Big B:
I think you may have overlooked these:
http://www.thedisciplinedinvestor.com/blog/2010/02/05/charts-payroll-gallery/
http://www.thedisciplinedinvestor.com/blog/2010/02/05/nfp-report-preview-goldman-prediction-is-outlier/
and
http://www.thedisciplinedinvestor.com/blog/2010/02/04/initial-and-continuing-claims-nasty-reports/
Best!
Andrew