I’m the wrong gender to be contemplating the ‘meaning’ behind Mother’s Day, although if the ‘statistic’ I read yesterday is correct, the $1.9 BILLION spent on ‘flowers for mom’ is all the ‘meaning’ commerce needs to flog this Sunday ‘non-holiday’.
You can bet psychologists and socioligists have a field day batting around the ‘value’ of holding forth a ‘day of celebration’ for this institution or that cherished ideal.
Understand, commerce has dug through the dung heap of human emotion and exploited (or at least attempted to exploit) every one they could find.
But we digress (as usual.)
Back to the ‘Destruction of our civilization!’
In keeping with ‘tradition’ (this blog has been around for a while) we will visit one of our favorite sources for economic input.
No. 367: April Labor Numbers, Money Supply, Dollar and Precious Metals
Subscription required May 6th, 2011
• Increasingly Misleading Seasonal-Factors Continued to Pummel Accuracy of Jobs Data • April Household Survey Showed 190,000 Employment Drop
• April Unemployment Rates: 9.0% (U.3), 15.9% (U.6), 22.3% (SGS)
• Broad Money Supply Gains in April
• Underlying Inflation, Dollar and Precious Metals Fundamentals Unchanged [More; but you need to subscribe to see it.]
Um, if we start ‘from the top’ we encounter the wildly inaccurate unemployment data the government uses to determine whether or not they need to ‘extend’ benefits beyond the ‘standard’ 26 weeks.
This summer will mark the 4th year since the crisis began…and we are supposedly going into our 2nd year of ‘recovery’.
But my point would be that the only two numbers that matter are the two you never see published. One is the current size of the, er, ‘working age population’. This number stands, as of last month, at 239 million. Then we look at the official size of the ‘civilian workforce’, which currently stands at 139 million, we see a ‘gap’ of 100 million workers.
Understand that the 139 million ‘includes’ the 13.8 million people currently drawing unemployment benefits! So if we look at how many ‘jobs’ there are in the economy we arrive at 126 million (roughly.)
Hard to say what’s more disturbing, the fact that the size of the civilian workforce has grown by almost 20 million since the last time I looked or the fact that our system of commercce basically tells half of us to go suck our thumbs?
Now we need to come back to another significant ‘datapoint’; the one where there are six applicants for EVERY open job.
Now, remind me, where, precisely, is that ‘recovery’ they keep babbling about?
Not for nothing good citizen but where do any of you think this is headed? What do YOU suppose the ‘logical outcome’ of this sort of…well, economic collapse (for the lack of a better description) will be?
And we’re not talking ten years from now and we’re also not talking ‘maybe’ here.
We’re talking this summer and that, my friends, is just WEEKS away!
Can they keep things ‘limping along’?
We’ll see.
Um, the second bullet point is a shocker because it is mentioned nowhere else in the corporate owned media…and sometimes the ‘difference’ between the household survey and the ‘birth/death’ model is debated for our benefit...
For some reason they chose to remain silent on the topic this month…probably too many other ‘contrary indicators’ to put up a spirited defense of the flagging economy.
So, the ‘wildly optimistic’ birth/death model says the economy added 244,000 jobs while the household survey says the economy lost 190,000. Is the ‘real answer’ somewhere in the middle?
How long do you think they can keep the ‘deception’ up?
It has been going on for years now, maybe decades.
And by this point in the game only the dumbest among us believe these so-called ‘statistics’.
The third bullet point is unsurprising considering April marks the (official) ‘end’ of ‘quantative easing’.
The final bullet point is a bit disconcerting because the erosion of our purchasing power will soon become a major factor in the coming economic meltdown.
Again, the ‘equation’ is pretty simple: when your income doesn’t meet your outgo working for somebody else becomes pretty pointless…worse, it is a waste of YOUR valuable time!
You can only afford to make someone else rich if the effort provides you with what you need to ‘get by’.
The ‘Kabuki Dance’ (of capitalism) is going to stop someday and when it does all hell is going to break loose! Many will die in the scramble that follows…your primary objective is not to be one of them.
I’m in the camp that says the dance will stop sooner rather than later. You have to decide for yourself whether or not the situation is, er, ‘salvagable’.
Under the it all ties in depending on how you look at it category, we have this piece from Ilargi to provide you with a ‘contrasting’ perspective.
Ilargi: There are two main stories going into the weekend: first, the US BLS employment report, and second, the Greek situation - German magazine Der Spiegel suggested Athens might want out of the Eurozone, and issue its own currency again.
First things first: when, as happened on Friday, stock markets rise while the official U3 unemployment rate goes up (to 9% in this case, U6 reached 15.9%), it's obvious that there's a huge disconnect between those same markets on the one hand, and Joe and Jane Main Street on the other. As usual, to know what really goes on, you have to look below the surface of the numbers. I thought I’d leave it at this, quoted from Mike Shedlock’s take:
In the last year, the civilian population rose by 1,817,000. Yet the labor force dropped by 1,099,000. Those not in the labor force rose by 2,916,000. In January alone, a whopping 319,000 people dropped out of the workforce. In February another 87,000 people dropped out of the labor force. In March 11,000 people dropped out of the labor force. In April, 131,000 dropped out of the labor force. The 4-month total for 2011 is 548,000 people dropped out of the labor force.
Many of those millions who dropped out of the workforce would start looking if they thought jobs were available. Indeed, in a 2-year old recovery, the labor force should be rising sharply as those who stopped looking for jobs, once again started looking. Instead, an additional 548,000 people dropped out of the labor force in the first four months of the year. Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the [U3] unemployment rate would be well over 11%.
Ilargi: Indeed, I’d venture that if you add in all those who’ve left the work force since 2008, you’d end up way above 11%. All in all, the total number of people in the working age population who are not in the labor force hit a new all time high of 86.248 million in April. And Wall Street likes that.
Um, I personally think it is unfortunate that Ilargi chose to quote that ‘rabid Libertarian’ ‘Mish’ as there is no ‘Libertarian solution’ to the current crisis.
Worse, the datapoints quoted are without reference points, rendering them meaningless.
You would have to go to the BLS report in question to make sense of the information.
But I’d opine the piddling monthly fluctuations don’t tell us much, the two ‘gross’ numbers I point to (the overall working aged population and the number of employed) tell you all you need to know.
And what do you ‘need to know’?
That our current system of commerce doesn’t ‘work’, nor can this be ‘fixed’ by re-arranging the pieces. Nothing short of a complete overhaul will rectify the situation and that complete overhaul starts with the government/legal system itself!
You have more ‘rights’ than our chiseling founders granted good citizen and its high time we stood up and claimed them!
Down with ‘wage slavery!’
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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