Friday, July 06, 2012

Recovery Summer begins With...80,000 New Jobs?

All the news is bad:

The U.S. economy created just 80,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate held steady at 8.2 percent, reflecting continued slow growth in the economy with the presidential election just four months away.

With yet another month of weak employment growth, the second quarter marks the weakest such period in two years.

Recent economic indicators have painted a fairly gloomy picture, with Institute of Supply Management numbers indicating a contraction...



But hey - it's an improvement from the 69,000 jobs created in May, right?  The unemployment rate held steady at 8.2%, so this means things are turning around, right?

No...it's actually even weaker than it looks - John Crudele in the New York Post yesterday, assuming over 100K new jobs, and explaining why even that number sucks:

Team Obama 2012 might be tempted to applaud 100,000 new jobs — but it really should take some advice from me and hold off on the clapping for a while. As my readers already know, there’s an upward bias in the springtime labor figures that is caused by something call the Birth/Death Model. 

This model tries to guess at the number of jobs being created by companies that...are too new for the Labor Department to survey.

So Labor guesses at the number of people these infant firms are employing. The Birth/Death Model guesses tend to be very optimistic during springtime and neutral during summer....For example, this past April the Labor Department guessed that 206,000 jobs were created by these invisible, unreachable companies. Then it added another 204,000 imaginary jobs in May.

Even with those generous guesses the employment picture looked gruesome this spring.

That brings us back to tomorrow’s June numbers, which also benefit from these happy guesses. Last June, Labor added 141,000 jobs to its count because it thinks small companies are on a hiring binge....


So how many of these 80,000 new jobs don't even exist?  Probably all of them.

And the next time someone quotes and "economist" to you, kick them in the ass. It's the stupidest science of all, apparently:

On Thursday, the ADP National Employment Report said U.S. private employers added 176,000 jobs in June. Economists had forecast 105,000 jobs would be added.


Wrong!

But relax...there is one areas of the economy where jobs are being added.  The field of extortion:

IRS Goes on 'Hiring Frenzy' After Supreme Court Ruling Upholding Affordable Care Act

Feel better yet?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

According to Zero Hedge:

U-6, or broad unemployment rose from 14.8% to 14.9%.

That the number includes people who have left the job market out of discouragement.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/june-non-farm-payrolls-come-80000-misses-expectations-unemployment-rate-82