jobs

Short Form: In seasonally adjusted terms, 165,000 jobs and unemployment dropping to 7.5% are OK, but not great results. At that job creation rate and taking population growth into account, it would take about 2 years to reduce by one million those currently unemployed. The BLS estimates current unemployment at 11.815 million. I calculate it at 20.542 million. So perhaps I should not say OK but rather next to nothing is being done to address the jobs situation. Read below the fold...

Short Form: In March, in the Household survey, the BLS undercount of those unemployed grew, and the labor force became smaller. It will take 6-12 months to know whether the declines we are seeing in the size of the labor force are cyclical or secular. The adjusted and unadjusted numbers for the labor force showed different pictures. Adjusted (trend line), the labor force fell with employment and unemployment also falling. Read below the fold...

In brief: Trendline, 236,000 jobs were added in February and the official unemployment rate fell to 7.7%. Actual jobs increased 959,000 but this followed a loss of 2.840 million last month. Similarly, employment rose 614,000 this month against a 1.446 million loss last month. However, notably the size of the labor force did not increase. The current rebuild and expansion of jobs should continue for the next two to three months. If this growth is choked off by the sequester or austerity, the consequences will extend through the rest of the year. My recalculated rate of unemployment remains high and declined only slightly to 12.5%. Hours increased this month which is good but wage gains taking inflation into account remain largely flat. Read below the fold...

From wunderground: Read below the fold...

The short form: Yearly revisions increased the number of jobs created in 2012 by 647,000. These revisions make some comparisons difficult between December 2012 and January 2013 and obscure that January is an absolutely dreadful month for jobs and employment in real terms. After Christmas, the economy sheds large numbers of jobs that are not picked back up until later in the spring. The result is that while the adjusted numbers show gains, these numbers mark a trend basically bridging a chasm. The bottom of that chasm is where the economy now is. Read below the fold...

The current BLS jobs report covering December 2012 states, without qualification, that the official or U-3 unemployment rate remained unchanged at 7.8%. It is only on page 5 of the pdf in a table that you find that the November rate was originally reported (a few days before the election) as a more favorable 7.7% down from 7.9%. This revision is part of the BLS' yearly revision of its numbers in the Household (people) survey. This complicates matters because revisions to the Establishment (jobs) survey will not happen until next month. Read below the fold...

[Please support lambert's fund drive. How many progressive sites do you know that have taken on the anti-progressivism of the modern Democratic party and had the integrity to move beyond it? Very few, and none with the panache that lambert brings to the effort] Read below the fold...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to struggle with a model that does not correspond well to what is going on in the economy. Follow me. In the Establishment or survey of businesses, 171,000 jobs (seasonally adjusted) were created in October. In the Household survey, employment (seasonally adjusted) increased by 410,000 or about two and a half times the number of jobs created. Now the two surveys have very different levels of statistical significance: 100,000 for the Establishment survey and 400,000 for the Household survey, and they cover slightly different population sets, but it would seem a goal of its modeling that the two surveys converge as much as possible. Read below the fold...

On June 7, 2001, HR 1836 the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed into law. This was the first and largest of several tax cut bills passed during the Bush Administration. It was estimated to cost $1.35 trillion with most of its benefits going to rich. So this should have spurred job creation. Give money to the "job creators" and they will create jobs, no?

The graph below (from the BLS' Establishment survey) covering the Bush and Obama years shows, in fact, what happened.

Read below the fold...

I came across this recently from Obama's stump speech:

Now we’ve added more than 5 million new jobs, more manufacturing jobs than any time since the 1990s. The unemployment rate has fallen from 10 percent to 7.8 percent. Foreclosures are at their lowest in five years. Home values are on the rise. Stock market has doubled. Manufacturing is coming back. Assembly lines are putting folks back to work. That’s what we’ve been fighting for. Those are the promises I’ve kept.”

Read below the fold...

In September's report, we are presented with two contradictory numbers. An uninspiring 114,000 jobs were created versus a stellar three-tenths of a percent decline in unemployment to 7.8%. Basically, what we had was an anomalous spike in employment in September of 873,000. This was made up of 456,000 unemployed. A tenth percent change in unemployment represents about 150,000 people. Three-tenths would come to about 450,000. So that checks. The September employment spike also includes some 418,000 people entering the labor force. The main driver of the spike appears to be a 582,000 increase in involuntary part time workers. Read below the fold...

On September 24, 2012, Josh Lehner published a post comparing employment (jobs) and unemployment rates in and after various financial crises, including Sweden in 1991 and the US in 2008. Lehner concluded that the policy response to the 2008 financial crisis "compares pretty favorably" and that

While the initial path of both the global and U.S. economies in 2008 and 2009 effectively matched the early years of the Great Depression – or worse –the strong policy response employed by nearly all major economies – both monetary and fiscal – helped stop the economic free fall.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a 386,000 adjustment to its 2012 jobs figures, putting Obama in positive (+125,000) jobs territory for the first time in his Administration. This will no doubt make for good cheering material for the Obama campaign, but it rather misses the larger and far more important point that we still have a jobs deficit since the January 2008 jobs peak of nearly 11 million. That positive 125,000 is achieved by ignoring two major factors: job losses in 2008 before Obama became President (recessions are impolitic and don't wait for Presidential Inaugurations to begin) and 4 1/2 years of population growth in the labor age population. Read below the fold...

The big number is that unemployment dropped two-tenths of a percent from 8.3% to 8.1%. However, the illusory nature of this drop can be seen in the fact that the number of jobs increased only 96,000. Essentially, what happened is that the unemployment rate declined, not because people found jobs but because the BLS defined them out of the labor force. Both of these numbers are seasonally adjusted.

In revisions of jobs numbers from the previous two months, June was revised down 19,000 from 64,000 to 45,000. It had originally been reported at 80,000, already a weak number, in the July report. The good, not great, number of 163,000 for July was decreased by 22,000 to 141,000. So a downward adjustment of 41,000 overall. Read below the fold...

Got this in an e-mail yesterday from my brother, Hal:

“June food stamp Recipients Hit All Time High As Three Times As Many Americans Enter Poverty As Find Jobs, bringing the total to a new all time high of 46.670 million and once again rising fast.”

Read below the fold...