Friday, July 3, 2009

Fact or Fiction?

Greetings good citizen,

I was of the impression that the unemployment numbers wouldn’t be released until Friday…but apparently even BLS employees wanted their long weekend.

We all remember last month’s amazing report of 345,000 (which was after the ‘birth/death’ model added in 230,000 ‘imaginary’ jobs.) Apparently all of the bean counters (that have been consistently wrong so far) ‘projected’ that this months figures would be even lower.

Surprise, surprise…they were wrong again.

Worse, the equally as ‘imaginatively’ price stock markets dropped 200 plus points.

Is anyone else getting tired of this ‘Kabuki Dance’ yet? Perhaps more importantly, we still don’t have an answer to the BLS’s ‘math problem’ of how weekly job losses come in at over 600,000 and yet the monthly total is magically in the 400,000 range?

There not only aren’t any jobs in the paper but a recent report says there are five applicants for EVERY job opening in the US…which points directly to the true crux of the problem, capitalism is incapable of creating jobs for everyone that needs one!

Before I go too far off the reservation let’s proceed to tonight’s offering where Mr. Williams of Shadowstats provides us with his usual insights…

Flash Update: Subscription required: July 2nd, 2009


• June Jobs Loss Was 513,000 Net of Concurrent Seasonal Factor Bias, Likely Topped 700,000 with Birth-Death Machinations
• Payroll Employment Growth Overstatement Could Top 2.5 Million per Year with Birth-Death Modeling
• Annual Payroll Decline Deepened to 4.2%, Equal to 1958 Trough and Near 1949 Trough • SGS-Alternate Unemployment at 20.6%


Hmmn, lets take a look at Mr. William’s second bullet point here for a minute. The ‘Birth/Death’ model could ‘over-state’ employment by two and a half million jobs over the course of a single year…

What if we flip that rock over and look at the roughly 650,000 weekly job losses that have been reported as 460,000 monthly losses? Doesn’t that ‘understate’ the true number of unemployed by, well, 33 million, annually?

It is ‘assumed’ that large numbers of the weekly unemployed find work ‘somewhere’ before the end of the month.

Given the current state of the economy, there isn’t a sector we can point to and say, yeah, that’s where they’re going.

Or is there something more disturbing going on here? Are the bulk of folks that lose their jobs on a weekly basis ‘ineligible’ for unemployment benefits?

I’m flogging a dead horse here, good citizen…Mr. William’s final bullet points to the larger problem. Our ‘total payroll’ figures are dropping like a rock, which means there is less money circulating through the economy.

This is a double-edged sword, as it indicates that not only are more people not working, but those who still have jobs are being paid less.

Let’s put two and two together, shall we?

Our debt is sky high and people are being paid less…does this sound like a recipe for ‘economic recovery’ to you?

Is the ‘secret’ to solving our financial crisis lay in making our money ‘work harder’?

Because it certainly seems to involve making you work just as hard for less income.

Perhaps more perplexing is the question as to whether or not they have done anything towards putting the economy on the path to recovery…

If they’ve pinned all of their hopes to the ‘stimulus package’…we’re in a heap of trouble.

Almost all of the states have initiated new taxes to deal with their budget shortfalls…in the meantime, employers are ‘taking advantage’ of the slack in the labor markets to cut wages everywhere.

I’ll ask you again: do you see an ‘economic recovery’ behind these policies?

Home values are falling while available credit is being slashed due to rising defaults…does that look like we’re ‘on the path’ to an economic recovery?

Understand, we will eventually ‘hit bottom’, left to our collective imaginations is whether or not it will be ‘rock bottom’ that leaves us with an economy so anemic that instead of recovery, our economy simply collapses?

You don’t see any of the pundits broaching that subject (yet) but that doesn’t mean the potential for that outcome doesn’t exist.

It does and we’re sliding closer to it with each misstep of the idiots in charge!

Not that you’ll ever see them admit, much less acknowledge that truth.

A government without credibility creates a society of strangers that don’t know who to trust.

The ‘giant’ is roused…if it wakens under these circumstances it will destroy everything in its path.

And there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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