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Well, today’s Jobs Report from the BLS for June 2011 is out and the news is not good. In this post from Tuesday (July 6), I had predicted:

My guess is that the private sector jobs (the ADP number) will be in the 50K range while the overall economy will be 20K to 25K max.

As I admitted in this post from yesterday (July 7), I was off fairly badly on my prediction for the ADP number. Unfortunately for the economy, I was a hell of a lot more accurate on the BLS number than the supposed expert economists (via Reuters):

U.S. employment growth ground to a halt in June, with employers hiring the fewest number of workers in nine months, dampening hopes the economy was on the cusp of regaining momentum after stumbling in recent months.

Nonfarm payrolls rose only 18,000, the weakest reading since September, the Labor Department said on Friday, well below economists’ expectations for a 90,000 rise.

Many economists raised their forecasts on Thursday after a stronger-than-expected reading on U.S. private hiring from payrolls processor ADP, and they expected gains of anywhere between 125,000 and 175,000.

The unemployment rate climbed to 9.2 percent, the highest since December, from 9.1 percent in May.

CNN in this article from yesterday is actually fairly pessimistic overall (as they should be – though they poo-poo the idea of a “double-dip” recession):

But don’t get duped into thinking that Thursday’s stronger-than-expected ADP private payrolls number, as well as some solid data about the manufacturing sector in the past week, is a sign that the economy is back on solid footing either.

At his “Twitter Town Hall” Tuesday, President Obama continued to paint his theme that the jobs are being created in his response to a tweet/question from Speaker of the House John Boehner:

THE PRESIDENT: — John obviously needs to work on his typing skills. (Laughter.) Well, look, obviously John is the Speaker of the House, he’s a Republican, and so this is a slightly skewed question. (Laughter.) But what he’s right about is that we have not seen fast enough job growth relative to the need. I mean, we lost, as I said, 4 million jobs before I took office, before I was sworn in. About 4 million jobs were lost in the few months right after I took office before our economic policies had a chance to take any effect.

And over the last 15 months, we’ve actually seen two million jobs created in the private sector. And so we’re each month seeing growth in jobs, But when you’ve got a 8 million dollar — 8-million-job hole and you’re only filling it 100,000-200,000 jobs at a time each month, obviously that’s way too long for a lot of folks who are still out of work.

There are a couple of things that we can continue to do. I actually worked with Speaker Boehner to pass a payroll tax cut in December that put an extra $1,000 in the pockets of almost every single American. That means they’re spending money. That means that businesses have customers. And that has helped improve overall growth.

Uh Mr. President? The economy does in fact include both public and private sectors. Using June as an example, it doesn’t really help much when the private sector creates 157K jobs in a month but the public sector cuts 139K jobs. As I noted in this post yesterday, everything is interconnected and none of the pieces of the economy operate in a vacuum. And as for the “…payroll tax cut in December that put an extra $1,000 in the pockets of almost every single American?” That “…almost every single American…” does not include the millions of people who are and have been unemployed. Roughly 14M or more. It also does not include all the people who are now “independent contractors” or “self-employed” who are not counted in the official unemployed ranks but are struggling to find work of any sort nor does it likely include many of the people who are underemployed. When you add all these folks together, you are approaching 30M people or more is my guess. Which is nearly 10% of the total population of the United States.

Reuters had this article yesterday on the “99′ers” – people who have exhausted up to 99 weeks of unemployment compensation and are still struggling to find employment:

Unlike in much of Europe, the safety net of the U.S. welfare system times out for the long-term unemployed. The federal government and many states have provided extra help for those caught up in the worst labor market in decades but the U.S. debt crisis rules out further extension of the programs.

Coyne is typical of many middle-class Americans now struggling to get by.

She used to earn $70,000 a year as an administrative assistant until her firm began to downsize and left Coyne among the growing number of Americans struggling to live on unemployment benefits, and eventually on minimal food aid.

Now Washington is considering cuts to social welfare programs to shrink a swelling budget deficit.

It may not only be Americans like Coyne who feel the pain. Some economists say the cuts could make it even harder to shrink long-term unemployment that damages the wider economy by dampening consumer demand and lowering output.

My bold. There it is once again. There is no demand for goods and services. While I see articles frequently claiming that there’s a “new normal” on unemployment due to “structural changes,” that does not explain all the recent college grads struggling to find jobs.

Unfortunately for millions of us, nothing seems to be penetrating the Beltway Bubble and the consciousness of the (un)representative elected officials.

And because I can:

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy

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Yesterday in this post, I predicted today’s Jobs Report from the BLS would show a far smaller increase in jobs for May than was being predicted by the ‘economists’ interviewed by the various media organizations. The ‘experts’ were predicting 170k private sector jobs with 150k increase overall. My prediction was for 42.5K jobs overall. Guess who was closer to being correct? (via Reuters):

The U.S. economy may be in for a prolonged period of soft growth as employers hired the fewest number of workers in eight months in May and the unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent.

Nonfarm payrolls increased 54,000 last month, the Labor Department said, fewer than the most pessimistic forecast in the Reuters survey and just over a third of what economists had expected.

…snip…

The private sector, which has shouldered the burden of job creation added just 83,000 jobs, the least since last June, while government payrolls dropped 29,000.

Adding to the gloomy labor market picture, about 39,000 fewer jobs were created in March and April than previously estimated.

…snip…

Payrolls had been expected to rise 150,000, with private employment gaining 175,000.

This is not the first time I have been more accurate than the “experts”. How is it possible for someone like me to be more accurate in predicting the numbers than the so-called expert economists? Well, I’ll take a WAG and say it might be because I’m not trying to force reality into a pre-conceived computer model designed to reinforce an ideological position based as much on wishful thinking as anything else. Plus, I am actually living the life of the long term un and underemployed.
Read the rest of this entry →

I am afraid I may be starting to think like an economist. Now why would I be afraid I’m becoming an economist? Because I was surprised when the March Jobs Report came out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and showed 216K new jobs for March, an increase of 15K even over the ADP report from Wednesday. From Reuters:

(Reuters) – U.S. employment recorded a second straight month of solid gains in March and the jobless rate fell to a two-year low of 8.8 percent, underscoring a decisive shift in the labor market that should help to underpin the economic recovery.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 216,000 last month, the largest increase since May, the Labor Department said on Friday. The gain built on the 194,000 new positions added in February.

David Dayen at Firedoglake News did his standard excellent job of dissecting this report. And as he does, he manages to puncture the coming cheereladers, even before they get started:

And where did these new jobs come from? About 1/2 of the total came in the service sector. 29,000 hires came from temp work. Professional and technical services increased by about 35,000, and manufacturing and mining increased slightly. Health care was also a continued strong sector.

The public sector continues to be a drag on growth. It edged downward again, as $10 billion in budget cuts for the year, enacted in two stopgap spending bills, took effect. Since the peak in September 2008 (notice the time frame), public sector jobs have decreased by 416,000. And with expected cuts coming at the state and federal level, more layoffs are on the way.

I would like to reinforce a couple of his points here. Out of 216K new jobs, nearly half are in the services sector. 29K are in temp work. It is the expected cuts in public sector jobs at all levels that had me anticipating a far lower number of new jobs for March. The complete BLS News Release is here.

Of course, it didn’t take long for a White House response to the BLS report. From Reuters:

White House economist Austan Goolsbee said on Friday the March jobs reports showed signs of an improving U.S. economy but that surely there will be bumps in the road ahead.

Today’s NY Times had a few articles on some of those “bumps in the road” Mr Goolsbee mentions. First up is this one on people struggling to get ahead because of the low wage jobs:

Hard as it can be to land a job these days, getting one may not be nearly enough for basic economic security.

The Labor Department will release its monthly snapshot of the job market on Friday, and economists expect it to show that the nation’s employers added about 190,000 jobs in March. With an unemployment rate that has been stubbornly stuck near 9 percent, those workers could be considered lucky.

But many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.

These would be the jobs in the service sector. From the BLS News Release linked above:

In March, employment in the service-providing sector continued to expand, led
by a gain of 78,000 in professional and business services. Most of the gain
occurred in temporary help services (+29,000) and in professional and technical
services (+35,000).
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I would like to start today by pointing out an error I made yesterday. I assumed that since March was not finished with us, that the ADP jobs report for March would not be issued until next Wednesday. I guess ADP figures the last few days of the month don’t matter so long as they get a report out two days prior to the BLS report for the overall economy issued on the first Friday of the new month.

From Reuters on today’s (Wednesday, March 30) ADP report:

(Reuters) – Private employers added 201,000 jobs in March, while February’s figure was revised down slightly, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

The data was largely in line with expectations. Economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast the ADP Employer Services report would show a gain of 203,000 jobs. The report is jointly developed with Macroeconomic Advisers LLC.

February’s figure was revised down to 208,000 from 217,000.

“Basically the number was very much in line with expectations and shows that the labor recovery continues at a reasonable pace,” said David Katz, chief investment officer at Matrix Asset Advisors in New York.

Of course, Mr Katz is not accounting for the loss of jobs in the public sector. And there have been job losses in the public sector this past month.

But there have been a few articles I’ve seen during my daily surfing of the toobz, from today and earlier, that tell us a bit more about the state of the economy than the ADP report and the words of Mr Katz can tell us.

First up is this article from today’s Hartford Courant on New London, CT schools that are now providing free suppers (to go with free breakfasts and lunches) for students from low income families. From the article:

While many schools across Connecticut provide free or reduced lunch and breakfast to students from low-income homes, New London was the first to provide supper, too. Bridgeport recently launched a similar program, and Norwich is considering it.
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graphic: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

The official Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers for January 2011 are out and guess what? Same shit, different day.

According to the report (via Reuters) the jobs increase for January 2011 is 36K. This is compared to Wednesday’s report from ADP (from my post on Wednesday), that the private sector created 187K jobs in January. Since the BLS number includes public sector as well as private sector, it looks like governments at all levels shed approximately 150K jobs. The same thing as happened last month, where the number of private sector jobs was initially reported as 297K (later downgraded to 247K) while the overall number from BLS was 103K.

Of course, what will be reported heavily is that the “unemployment rate” has “dropped” to 9% from 9.4%:

There was some good news in the employment report as the jobless rate fell to 9 percent from 9.4 percent in December. The household survey from which the unemployment rate is derived showed the number of unemployed dropped by about 600,000 last month.

The unemployment rate had previously declined largely as a result of people giving up the search for work, but in January the labor force was unchanged, even after adjustments for updated population controls.

The reality appears to me to be that all the numbers are probably fudged and no one in any position to do anything or comment on it has a clue. As I said, same shit, different day.  . . . Read the rest of this entry →

Well, the January Jobs Report that is issued by ADP each month, detailing the number of private sector jobs created the month before is out. Last month, the ADP report had this number at 297K new jobs. When the official Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics report came out a couple of days later, the real number of jobs was pegged at 103K new jobs for the month. Of course, the difference is because ADP only evaluates private sector jobs while the BLS report details all jobs, including those in the public sector where a lot of state and local governments have been cutting jobs.

Today’s ADP report (via Reuters):

The private sector added 187,000 jobs in January, compared with a downwardly revised 247,000 jobs in December, a report by payrolls processor ADP Employer Services showed on Wednesday.

The ADP figures come ahead of the government’s more comprehensive January labor market report on Friday, which includes both public and private sector employment.

But ADP figures for December — both initial and revised — turned out to be much stronger than the government report showed, adding to doubts about the reliability of ADP as a predictor of payrolls.

Now as I mentioned above, the differences between the ADP numbers and the BLS numbers are most likely due to the addition of public sector jobs being included in the BLS figures. I do though find it a bit interesting that ADP revised their December numbers down 50K jobs, an almost 17% downward revision from the original report. If that happens for January, then the 187K jobs becomes 155K jobs, which is just above the jobs break even point of 125K to 150K needed each month just to maintain status quo on employment and absorb new people entering the work force each month. And with the public sector most likely showing a decline again it will still keep the official unemployment rate well above 9% and the un and underemployment rate in the official area of 17% (which I believe is an under count myself). So we still will be in the 25M to 30M range of un and underemployed with millions of people out long term (defined as more than six months).  . . . Read the rest of this entry →

Last week when the Jobs Reports for December 2010 came out, I was a bit skeptical:

But you will pardon me if I’m a bit skeptical about this wonderful news. December is a time when there are a lot of short term hires due to the holiday season. I assume that ADP does make some adjustment for the seasonal factor and while 297K new jobs is definitely a good start, as I (and others) have noted recently, even if those jobs are something more than short term, minimum wage positions for the holidays, the odds are good that a lot of them are of the Perma-Temp fashion, with limited to no benefits. So I guess I’m going to hold off on the cheerleading the report.

Well, today (January 13) Initial Jobless Claims Report seems to bear out my skepticism. From CNN:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The number of Americans filing for their first week of unemployment benefits jumped sharply last week, two weeks after hitting a 2-1/2 year low below 400,000.

There were 445,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Jan. 8, the Labor Department said in a weekly report Thursday.

That’s up 35,000 from a revised 410,000 the previous week — when jobless claims climbed back above 400,000 after falling below that mark for the first time in more than two years.

Last week’s rise was bigger than expected. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast initial claims to edge up to 415,000 in the latest report.

Of course, Economists were “surprised” at the news. What else is new. Economists are always surprised. I guess they missed the article from the AP yesterday (via MSNBC) that employers were posting fewer jobs in November.

Of course, the Federal Reserve is still in ostrich mode. From Reuters yesterday:

The Fed reported better conditions across all 12 of its districts, though banking and financial services showed results that varied by region.

“Economic activity continued to expand moderately from November through December,” the central bank said in a statement.

The findings were consistent with a recent pick-up in U.S. economic data that has prompted some economists to beef up their forecasts for growth in the first half of 2011.

The U.S. economy grew 2.6 percent in the third quarter, a level considered too meek to put a significant dent in the nation’s 9.4 percent jobless rate.

So things are getting better but not better enough to actually show any improvements in things. Yeah, that works.  . . . Read the rest of this entry →