Let’s take a fun romp through some of the employment charts today:
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via Calculated Risk
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Source: Bianco Research
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via Bruce Steinberg
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
The best way to keep money in perspective is to have some. —Louis Rukeyser
"It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine" say the French as consumer confidence in May rose to the highest since Nov '10 as they welcome and get excited about new Pres Hollande. Also, the French 10 yr bond yield touched the lowest on record this morning. June consumer confidence in Germany held at 5.7, just .2 pts off the highest since Mar '11. To the euro bond debate which is now taking on greater rhetoric with those with high bond yields wanting them and those with low ones saying no way, ECB member...
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November 4th, 2011 at 1:03 pm
The U6 Unemployment chart still sports a bullish flag. The implied target is around 10.5% if it breaks to the norm (up).
Less likely is the H&S top on the total non-farm payroll chart. That implied target would be 120-million non farm payroll jobs, which would be a Great Depression type number.
November 4th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
That’s very frightening (participation rates continuing to fall during a recovery). Occupy Wall Street is going to turn into Hooverville pretty quick across the rest of the country.
On NPR this morning they were interviewing two of the long term unemployed – an interior decorator and an art director. The interior decorator said she was treating looking for a job like a full time job, “I get up every morning and get on the computer and see if anything new is available and then I go to my yoga class.” The thing the art director said was strange was that she hadn’t bought new pants in two years when she, “…used to go to Ann Taylor at lunch time and buy six pairs.”
It’s anecdotal, but I don’t think the pain level has reached the level it’s going to reach in about two years for the people who forgot to learn anything useful in college.
November 4th, 2011 at 1:57 pm
This paints a bullish picture for equities if I’ve seen one.
November 4th, 2011 at 2:22 pm
i suppose if the definition of successful is equivalent to robbing from the poor and stealing from the middle class – and that’s a societal “okay” – then we shouldn’t be surprised when those who have been so swindled return the favor, take matters into their own hands and chaos ensues.
What ever happened to cooperation, team work, and community? Have we been intellectually asleep all these years? Is this the only way we can share the space, prioritize, and make decisions? It’s no wonder we’re on our way out as a species, having no regard for our own environment or each other.
November 4th, 2011 at 6:57 pm
These charts are hideous. This indicates the greatest danger of Keynesian stimulus: Since the Reagan days, this deficit spending has hidden the true problems underlying job growth, so the worst possible outcome is manifested.
The problems appear to go away, but are in fact getting worse. There is no worse solution than one that **appears** to work, but does not.
It is actually better to try a solution that fails, than to apply a solution that appears to work.
Now we’re 30 years into a gradually increasing need for deficit to maintain employment. Nothing, NOTHING is good about an economy that needs a trillion dollars of deficit spending to mainting a 58% employment participation rate.
It’s cold turkey time, guys. Deficit spending has NEVER worked to fix REAL problems, it’s only made it appear that our problems were getting better. Every day we put off living within our means, we worsen our problems. We now have to cut around $1.5 trillion of federal spending to keep from handing our kids the debt we created, and pay the bills. If we don’t cut it, the rising interest payments will force us to do so. There is no pretty way out.
We can try to hand our 80M kids that have not voted yet the $50k of debt each, but as they grow older they will follow the example we have set for them and vote away the debt to others or revolt. They owe the country not a single dime.
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BR: To a man whose only tool is a hammer, everything soon looks like a nail . . .
November 4th, 2011 at 7:34 pm
Want to see some scary stat’s? Go to John Williams’ Shadow Governmnet Statistics:
http://www.shadowstats.com/
Great Depression deja vu allover again? I’m long soup bowls.
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BR: We are in bad shape, but far far away from the Great Depression
November 5th, 2011 at 6:31 am
We’ve been using the hammer for 30 years, bro. I’m actually advocating putting the hammer down and trying some other tools.
November 5th, 2011 at 7:07 am
Barry, how can you claim Greenspan was a moron who created an overabundance of houses by keeping interest rates too low, then turn around and claim deficit spending, which is just another form of easy money, isn’t going to make an “abundance of gov’t” problem grow?
You economists got together in Europe a few months ago and couldn’t agree on what caused the recession. You guys aren’t in a branch of science, you’re in a branch of politics. Loose the hubris, ok? Justify your positions with facts and historical or contemporary examples of success, ok?
30 years of deficit spending is clearly resulting in worse and worse recessionary trends, longer and deeper each time. Deficit spending has grown in lock step with corporate bailouts and cronyism in govt. Tolerance should not be extended to white collar criminals. The looting has to end. There’s a reason Washington is not pursuing criminals, you should spend some time thinking about why that is so. Why would policemen not pursue criminals?
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BR: 1. I am not an economist — my background is in applied mathematics/physics (with a BA in Pol.Sci/Phil), and I earned a law degree.
2. I’ve written repeatedly that economics falls between Wymmins studies and sociology.
3. Greenspan created an over-abundance of credit, which then fueled housing madness.
4. The big issue is the underwater houses which the credit bubble helped to create
5. Your claim that “30 years of deficit spending is clearly resulting in worse and worse recessionary trends” ignores prior history. Think great depression ands 19th century busts, none of which had deficit spending as a cuasation.
Dude, you are a single issue guy. and you see the world through that lens. Try that in asset management and you end up broke
November 5th, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Barry u r a sharp guy for sure. And I have ten other policy ideas I champion. But how will we know if either of our ideas work if a trillion dollars of deficit spending is in play?
November 6th, 2011 at 8:50 am
I just checked my portfolio, BB, I’m 35% ahead of the S&P since 2004, not too bad?
But our nation shouldn’t be guided by the best portfolio manager, right?
The GDP equation clearly exposes how deficit spending quickly manifests false GDP growth when deficit spending is done, why both parties can’t stop it. Hiding behind that false health indicator, the real impact of any other policy changes can never be evaluated; the deficit spending is always hiding the pain. So,Deficit spending is especially good at obscuring bad policy, and if something good happens to the economy, then deficit doves say “deficit spending worked, let’s do more!”. It’s a lose-lose choice.
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BR: If I had a dollar everytime someone claimed to be way ahead of the S&P (but wasn’t), I’d be in the top 1% of wealth holders in the country (Oh, wait . . .)
If we had been adopting good policies for the last 30 years, then we wouldn’t need to be deficit spending, right? Deficit spending, with no history of long term real ROI success, is proof of both parties’ policy failure. Until we eliminate it, we’ll never be able to see what other policies are healthy or failing. That’s why it must be stopped prior to any other solutions, from either party.
November 6th, 2011 at 10:36 am
I’ve been trying to hire 2 or 3 people since July…..lots of applicants….all of which have been:
1. Not even remotely qualified…
2. Couldn’t pass a routine bkgrd check….IE..blatantly lying on application….
3. Couldn’t pass the routine pre-employment drug screen that my insurance co requires of me for liability.
4. Showed up to the interview wearing shorts and sandals….yes …this did happen…
5. Lied about job history and references….Yes…I check references…perish the thought….
I’m in Flyover Land.
LOTS of jobs out here.
I got a buddy who runs a chain of bedding stores in ATL….He’s been trying to hire 100 people all summer….he’s managed to find 10 so far….these are jobs that provide a living wage(40-100K)….yet he’s only filled 10 spots.
Just reporting what I’m seeing. The job market is soft YES….but there are LOT OF JOBS….seems folks just don’t want to work that much.
Not surprising considering we have spent the last 30 years pampering ourselves with easy money and cheap goods. We are fucking SOFT as a nation. TOO SOFT.
November 7th, 2011 at 7:35 am
The availability of easy money is all over this list. Doesn’t it bear mentioning that the entire nation is currently avoiding all the pain of these mistake, by, easy money? If the gov’t had been forced to deal immediately with the economic calamity of all these mistakes instead of bailing everyone out with Keynesian borrowing, we’d have a whole different sense of urgency right now.
Instead we have 30 years of Keynesian stimulus putting a happy face on all this. 80M kids now owe $50k at their high school graduation to a policy that has zero history of success. ZERO. I’ve posted the challenge here before – post one example, post-WWII of a nation deficit spending it’s way to economic success.
Keynesian Success == paying back all the borrowed money in 2-5 years with increased tax revenue (this never happens) + growing the economy in 2-5 years (this always happens).
The biggest single item of influence, dominating all others, is a policy that has 100% failure rate. Please don’t bring up the Clinton era – he got close to even but never paid back a dime, and he borrowed over $100B from our “lock-box” social security fund after predicting surpluses forever into the future.