On your final thoughts, a recovery is not in the foreseeable future. The structural barriers you limited yourself to are formidable. Considering the social and political landscape as well, it's difficult to see anything but a hard lesson coming from Reaganomics.
I am not a "socialist, communist, leftist, Marxist, liberal".
But at least some people will have multiple billions and multiple mansions in this new world, isn't that great? All they had to do to get them was stop paying their employees a decent wage. I'm surprised they hadn't thought of it previously... oh yeah, the unions in the old days wouldn't have gone along, and they couldn't outsource to China and India in those days.
Folks, I'm sorry but pay attention to the facts here. Just take a typical service. Try sending a package via USPS that is small vs. UPS. You'll quickly realize the difference. There are pension and budget issues with the Post office that Congress forced upon them. But in terms of service and costs, it's only when one gets into large heavy shipping that UPS competes. Then, FedEx is all about speed.
On the Census, that again is in part Congress's fault. Google, MasterCard and Visa know every move we make yet Congress will not let the Census, the BLS or the BEA update their surveys, collection methods and most importantly, add more data points. The demographics alone are from the 1960's, which is why I mention work by immigration status. That's what we need to know now. But absolutely they could. For example, simply allow the Census to collect data electronically, i.e. via web forms. Yet here come our "privacy" groups all up in arms, all the while Target knows when you are pregnant before you do. It's ridiculous. If they allowed the BLS access to private employment records from businesses, which they should consider, we could find out how many jobs are offshore outsourced but corporations instead force the BLS to sign NDAs and give them hardly any data on this.
Again, not right. We have a right to know about the state of work in this country.
Except the penny post office was invented by the libertarian free enterprise Lysander Spooner.
The US postal service then as now is model of waste and corruption.
I believe with scientific sampling methods a Census of the US could be done for far less money and more accuracy than
what the Census bureau does.
We're sorry but people need income, wealth in order to even retire. Medical costs are through the roof and with Medicare eating up people's retirement. The message of "suck it up" is not acceptable. There is nothing wrong with flexible work as long as it pays full benefits and high wages.
That's not what the large number of part-time really is in these numbers as we see from overall wages being flat or repressed.
Thinking it's perfectly ok for over 50% of wage earners to be below $26k a year is unacceptable, unless of course you enjoy third world poverty.
It's true, the seasonal adjustment algorithm is "blowing up" with these unusual weather patterns and Case-Shiller/S&P plain stopped reporting their housing price data, but that really has more to do with the housing bubble bust being so large it threw off the historical pattern data which the seasonal adjustment predictor uses to smooth out cycles due to the seasons.
Look at GDP, which is also seasonally adjusted, annualized, real valued, but I point to it because the latest is Q1, those unusually warm months. 1.9% isn't enough to generate jobs. Barely treading water.
I think your insights are dead on. Local governments are going to continue their slash and burn, esp. when most often revenues are coming from property taxes. California should be relabeled "little Greece" and they are so beyond dysfunctional, there is no way that government will do the right things to become efficient, corrupt, 1 party rule and their constitution doesn't enable any action on budgets.
The ADP report breaks down private job growth by business size and it's always the same, large businesses barely create any new jobs, it's always the mom and pops and that also usually means low paying jobs.
Right now corporate lobbyists are lining up in Congress and lining politicians' pockets to pass more foreign guest worker Visas. It's just unbelievable when the evidence is so clear these same corporations are not only never training Americans, giving them experience, they are literally displacing Americans by these methods.
Anyway, in terms of GDP and overviewing some of the other indicators as of late, I think we're in a stall and what is coming at us in 2013, well, I think the CBO is right, we're going to go into another recession.
We haven't even hit the infamous time bomb lurking out there in some funky derivatives trade where no reforms were actually done, just make for good copy when one blows up!
I might run some numbers on SA and NSA, birth/death and such and write it up. See if I can dig out the actual mathematics and thus limitations on the SA algorithm.
I wonder if there are some other factors making things look worse than they are:
1) The seasonals may be taking too much off the numbers.
2) The economy may have borrowed growth in the winter, especially in March with the exceptionally warm weather, and now it is giving some of that growth back.
3) Our old friend the birth/death model distorts the numbers needlessly.
Without some of these influences, perhaps the numbers would have come in as expected: 150,000 to 175,000. Wall Street would have been okay, though not necessarily happy.
I have a separate question. We keep reading that businesses are waiting for some magical economic signal before they are ready to hire. I assume that signal would have something to do with a self-sustaining recovery. I can see three impediments to a self-sustaining recovery. First, any extra money consumers get in their pockets seems to go to paying off debt, not helping the economy expand through consumer purchases. Second, local governments are in a position of sustained down-sizing, so no help is going to come from that sector. Third, large corporations might prefer to play the labor arbitrage game rather than hire US workers. All-in-all, we may be waiting for something that just isn't going to show up for years to come.
I remember when new math came along and I tried to help my child do division. I couldn't figure out what he was talking about as the new system was completely different from the old way.
Is this perhaps the same in the jobs market in this era - we are counting in yesterday's job currency?
I lead a small nonprofit organization that has felt the impacts of the recession. In 2008 and 2009 we all cut back our hours and no one had a pay raise until 2010. I didn't get one until this year. However as we come out of the "recession", we have grown as an organization. For the young, they enter via internships: We have hired an Americorps every year since 2007. Last year we offered a part time position to one and this year that position became full time. We'd like to hire two Americorps this year if the program is well funded. (I could probably handle many more - it's a great way for young to get work experience and businesses also benefit. It should be a priority for federal funding). For the mature, we go part time: we have two new positions that are 25% and 50% respectvely. Some of this is indvidual choice - when you are 60, part- time may be your ideal work scenario although you will still be counted as looking for fulltime via the unemployment stats if unemployed.
I look around my community and see this same type of scenario all over. In my husband's business (which works with the tech industry), they have added at least five jobs in their small shop in the last three years. Some are part-time and some are full-time by choice. He is full time but would love to be able to work part-time - but they can't allow that yet as they have too much work.
Life is different - young people enter via internships and mature people wind down with part time work. Yet we still seem to idealize the full-time "living wage" manufacturing job in all things statistics. We're in a brand new world folks
There is no society, none, in history, that could keep this up for long. You cannot have highly educated people with skills in all industries literally begging for paying jobs and getting nothings for years on end. When these people who have so much to offer are purposely ignored by "American" (in name only) companies and their puppets in government to cut costs and enrich themselves, you are creating an army of pissed off people who used to buy into the American Dream. You cannot have people who could design and produce tens of thousands of different products going from highly motivated and being the foundations of their towns and cities (morally and financially) into facing homelessness. People obtained all the necessary education, often at great personal cost and financial burdens, so that they could be extremely productive citizens in everything from medicine to engineering to aeronautics, physics, law, the military, and everything under the sun. Sidelining literally tens of millions of these people for months and years starting in their 20s on only breeds hate and despair. How can a society last when the vast majority of its citizens are angry and desperate and ignored by anyone in power who helped put them in those desperate straits? Answer: it cannot and will not unless these ostriches pull their heads out of the sand and realize not every one of them will be able to board the last chopper out of Saigon.
-Kurtz
This is just a slow bleed. Everyone who isn't a paid shill, a bankster, or a politician puppet or bureaucrat serving the banksters' global regime knows the Euro has been dead for a long time. Greece will leave and come back stronger in a few years which would not be possible if it followed Berlin's mandates. There are already banks runs now for weeks in Europe - why else would Greek police actually tell people it's safer to keep $ in banks and not in their homes other than to build false sense of security. The USD will get stronger short-term, but because Helicopter Ben and Turbo Timmy insist on printing us to oblivion because of QE 1-99 and ZIRP effects, eventually the USD will be used as kindling. But as long as the banksters like Christine "Let Them Eat Cake" Lagarde and the puppet masters like Blankfein and Dimon have gigs, it's all good.
This collection of latest European crisis events alludes to headline buzz, but this post Greece's false dawn spells it out.
Anyone really monitoring European events knows by now we get press release after press release, statement after statement, token action after token action trying to smooth over public perception. Yesterday's "good news Greek style" is just another one of those smooth over actions.
It seems some are angry at the lack of a "Pop" in price after the IPO. Angry Bear does some digging on successful IPOs recently. This post is talking about something different, but we tend to agree, anyone just assuming at the IPO the stock price will continue to rise from here, well, that just is not realistic.
Although an additional comment would be institutional investors might be also dumping their stock to take profits almost immediately.
Anyway, if the rage is because FB's stock didn't soar in price, hey, yet another not in reality assumption.
Anyone who has ordered temperature sensitive products from Amazon directly may suspect the warehouse is an oven when they get putrid products clearly stored above recommended temperatures.
Surprise employees were removed on stretchers and wheelchairs suffering from heat exhaustion. Just another example where workers are being treated so badly, literally they are at risk of dying or dying. Welcome to 1897.
But read a few articles here on China and currency. I hope people learn about this for it really causes a loss of U.S. jobs and balloons the U.S. trade deficit. For now folks have the choice of dunno know. But we hope you start reading.
This administration, the U.S. Treasury, Tim Geithner just claimed China is not manipulating their currency. We just overviewed the mechanics of China's currency manipulation.
So we ask, financial and economic readers, what do you think and consider leaving a comment in addition to voting in our poll.
As the previous comment noted, it only makes sense if the US government works for the Chinese. I'd take it a step further--the Chinese, with almost nobody noticing, have taken over the country. It's not an overt coup but more like blackmail. They can shut down our economy, our infrastructure, and who knows what else.
Now if only they'd do something about the short-sighted banksters who are ruining the middle class and sending our economy into the toilet....
Right, we see how well renewable energy subsidies have worked so far, e.g. Solyndra et al.
The key is driving down the price of electricity in this country. We do this by an "all of the above" strategy, which, despite the rhetoric, is antithetical to the aims of this current, pathetic administration.
That was one of the more ridiculous claims of this deal, that somehow they could "hacker proof" the bids and the system.
On the bottom line, I go to the 2011 U.S.-China Security and Economic Commission report and you are so right. Consider reading that link and some of the corresponding report, it's just downright amazingly frightening, yet those reports, commissioned by Congress, seem to go into this administration's wastebasket (and burned on the Congressional fire heap) in some of the beyond belief economic threat, security threat China poses, including being the #1 hacker location into U.S. systems and #1 for industrial espionage.
See factory orders for updated data. The graphs in this report are already updated by the text is from the advance release.
I might stop covering this release since it is so often revised only a week later.
Because of that this is just another market fast food buzz versus solid macroeconomic indicators.
On your final thoughts, a recovery is not in the foreseeable future. The structural barriers you limited yourself to are formidable. Considering the social and political landscape as well, it's difficult to see anything but a hard lesson coming from Reaganomics.
I am not a "socialist, communist, leftist, Marxist, liberal".
But at least some people will have multiple billions and multiple mansions in this new world, isn't that great? All they had to do to get them was stop paying their employees a decent wage. I'm surprised they hadn't thought of it previously... oh yeah, the unions in the old days wouldn't have gone along, and they couldn't outsource to China and India in those days.
Folks, I'm sorry but pay attention to the facts here. Just take a typical service. Try sending a package via USPS that is small vs. UPS. You'll quickly realize the difference. There are pension and budget issues with the Post office that Congress forced upon them. But in terms of service and costs, it's only when one gets into large heavy shipping that UPS competes. Then, FedEx is all about speed.
On the Census, that again is in part Congress's fault. Google, MasterCard and Visa know every move we make yet Congress will not let the Census, the BLS or the BEA update their surveys, collection methods and most importantly, add more data points. The demographics alone are from the 1960's, which is why I mention work by immigration status. That's what we need to know now. But absolutely they could. For example, simply allow the Census to collect data electronically, i.e. via web forms. Yet here come our "privacy" groups all up in arms, all the while Target knows when you are pregnant before you do. It's ridiculous. If they allowed the BLS access to private employment records from businesses, which they should consider, we could find out how many jobs are offshore outsourced but corporations instead force the BLS to sign NDAs and give them hardly any data on this.
Again, not right. We have a right to know about the state of work in this country.
Except the penny post office was invented by the libertarian free enterprise Lysander Spooner.
The US postal service then as now is model of waste and corruption.
I believe with scientific sampling methods a Census of the US could be done for far less money and more accuracy than
what the Census bureau does.
We're sorry but people need income, wealth in order to even retire. Medical costs are through the roof and with Medicare eating up people's retirement. The message of "suck it up" is not acceptable. There is nothing wrong with flexible work as long as it pays full benefits and high wages.
That's not what the large number of part-time really is in these numbers as we see from overall wages being flat or repressed.
Thinking it's perfectly ok for over 50% of wage earners to be below $26k a year is unacceptable, unless of course you enjoy third world poverty.
It's true, the seasonal adjustment algorithm is "blowing up" with these unusual weather patterns and Case-Shiller/S&P plain stopped reporting their housing price data, but that really has more to do with the housing bubble bust being so large it threw off the historical pattern data which the seasonal adjustment predictor uses to smooth out cycles due to the seasons.
Look at GDP, which is also seasonally adjusted, annualized, real valued, but I point to it because the latest is Q1, those unusually warm months. 1.9% isn't enough to generate jobs. Barely treading water.
I think your insights are dead on. Local governments are going to continue their slash and burn, esp. when most often revenues are coming from property taxes. California should be relabeled "little Greece" and they are so beyond dysfunctional, there is no way that government will do the right things to become efficient, corrupt, 1 party rule and their constitution doesn't enable any action on budgets.
The ADP report breaks down private job growth by business size and it's always the same, large businesses barely create any new jobs, it's always the mom and pops and that also usually means low paying jobs.
Right now corporate lobbyists are lining up in Congress and lining politicians' pockets to pass more foreign guest worker Visas. It's just unbelievable when the evidence is so clear these same corporations are not only never training Americans, giving them experience, they are literally displacing Americans by these methods.
Anyway, in terms of GDP and overviewing some of the other indicators as of late, I think we're in a stall and what is coming at us in 2013, well, I think the CBO is right, we're going to go into another recession.
We haven't even hit the infamous time bomb lurking out there in some funky derivatives trade where no reforms were actually done, just make for good copy when one blows up!
I might run some numbers on SA and NSA, birth/death and such and write it up. See if I can dig out the actual mathematics and thus limitations on the SA algorithm.
I wonder if there are some other factors making things look worse than they are:
1) The seasonals may be taking too much off the numbers.
2) The economy may have borrowed growth in the winter, especially in March with the exceptionally warm weather, and now it is giving some of that growth back.
3) Our old friend the birth/death model distorts the numbers needlessly.
Without some of these influences, perhaps the numbers would have come in as expected: 150,000 to 175,000. Wall Street would have been okay, though not necessarily happy.
I have a separate question. We keep reading that businesses are waiting for some magical economic signal before they are ready to hire. I assume that signal would have something to do with a self-sustaining recovery. I can see three impediments to a self-sustaining recovery. First, any extra money consumers get in their pockets seems to go to paying off debt, not helping the economy expand through consumer purchases. Second, local governments are in a position of sustained down-sizing, so no help is going to come from that sector. Third, large corporations might prefer to play the labor arbitrage game rather than hire US workers. All-in-all, we may be waiting for something that just isn't going to show up for years to come.
I remember when new math came along and I tried to help my child do division. I couldn't figure out what he was talking about as the new system was completely different from the old way.
Is this perhaps the same in the jobs market in this era - we are counting in yesterday's job currency?
I lead a small nonprofit organization that has felt the impacts of the recession. In 2008 and 2009 we all cut back our hours and no one had a pay raise until 2010. I didn't get one until this year. However as we come out of the "recession", we have grown as an organization. For the young, they enter via internships: We have hired an Americorps every year since 2007. Last year we offered a part time position to one and this year that position became full time. We'd like to hire two Americorps this year if the program is well funded. (I could probably handle many more - it's a great way for young to get work experience and businesses also benefit. It should be a priority for federal funding). For the mature, we go part time: we have two new positions that are 25% and 50% respectvely. Some of this is indvidual choice - when you are 60, part- time may be your ideal work scenario although you will still be counted as looking for fulltime via the unemployment stats if unemployed.
I look around my community and see this same type of scenario all over. In my husband's business (which works with the tech industry), they have added at least five jobs in their small shop in the last three years. Some are part-time and some are full-time by choice. He is full time but would love to be able to work part-time - but they can't allow that yet as they have too much work.
Life is different - young people enter via internships and mature people wind down with part time work. Yet we still seem to idealize the full-time "living wage" manufacturing job in all things statistics. We're in a brand new world folks
There is no society, none, in history, that could keep this up for long. You cannot have highly educated people with skills in all industries literally begging for paying jobs and getting nothings for years on end. When these people who have so much to offer are purposely ignored by "American" (in name only) companies and their puppets in government to cut costs and enrich themselves, you are creating an army of pissed off people who used to buy into the American Dream. You cannot have people who could design and produce tens of thousands of different products going from highly motivated and being the foundations of their towns and cities (morally and financially) into facing homelessness. People obtained all the necessary education, often at great personal cost and financial burdens, so that they could be extremely productive citizens in everything from medicine to engineering to aeronautics, physics, law, the military, and everything under the sun. Sidelining literally tens of millions of these people for months and years starting in their 20s on only breeds hate and despair. How can a society last when the vast majority of its citizens are angry and desperate and ignored by anyone in power who helped put them in those desperate straits? Answer: it cannot and will not unless these ostriches pull their heads out of the sand and realize not every one of them will be able to board the last chopper out of Saigon.
-Kurtz
This is just a slow bleed. Everyone who isn't a paid shill, a bankster, or a politician puppet or bureaucrat serving the banksters' global regime knows the Euro has been dead for a long time. Greece will leave and come back stronger in a few years which would not be possible if it followed Berlin's mandates. There are already banks runs now for weeks in Europe - why else would Greek police actually tell people it's safer to keep $ in banks and not in their homes other than to build false sense of security. The USD will get stronger short-term, but because Helicopter Ben and Turbo Timmy insist on printing us to oblivion because of QE 1-99 and ZIRP effects, eventually the USD will be used as kindling. But as long as the banksters like Christine "Let Them Eat Cake" Lagarde and the puppet masters like Blankfein and Dimon have gigs, it's all good.
This collection of latest European crisis events alludes to headline buzz, but this post Greece's false dawn spells it out.
Anyone really monitoring European events knows by now we get press release after press release, statement after statement, token action after token action trying to smooth over public perception. Yesterday's "good news Greek style" is just another one of those smooth over actions.
It seems some are angry at the lack of a "Pop" in price after the IPO. Angry Bear does some digging on successful IPOs recently. This post is talking about something different, but we tend to agree, anyone just assuming at the IPO the stock price will continue to rise from here, well, that just is not realistic.
Although an additional comment would be institutional investors might be also dumping their stock to take profits almost immediately.
Anyway, if the rage is because FB's stock didn't soar in price, hey, yet another not in reality assumption.
Anyone who has ordered temperature sensitive products from Amazon directly may suspect the warehouse is an oven when they get putrid products clearly stored above recommended temperatures.
Surprise employees were removed on stretchers and wheelchairs suffering from heat exhaustion. Just another example where workers are being treated so badly, literally they are at risk of dying or dying. Welcome to 1897.
But read a few articles here on China and currency. I hope people learn about this for it really causes a loss of U.S. jobs and balloons the U.S. trade deficit. For now folks have the choice of dunno know. But we hope you start reading.
you need a "don't know" option
p
This administration, the U.S. Treasury, Tim Geithner just claimed China is not manipulating their currency. We just overviewed the mechanics of China's currency manipulation.
So we ask, financial and economic readers, what do you think and consider leaving a comment in addition to voting in our poll.
As the previous comment noted, it only makes sense if the US government works for the Chinese. I'd take it a step further--the Chinese, with almost nobody noticing, have taken over the country. It's not an overt coup but more like blackmail. They can shut down our economy, our infrastructure, and who knows what else.
Now if only they'd do something about the short-sighted banksters who are ruining the middle class and sending our economy into the toilet....
Right, we see how well renewable energy subsidies have worked so far, e.g. Solyndra et al.
The key is driving down the price of electricity in this country. We do this by an "all of the above" strategy, which, despite the rhetoric, is antithetical to the aims of this current, pathetic administration.
That was one of the more ridiculous claims of this deal, that somehow they could "hacker proof" the bids and the system.
On the bottom line, I go to the 2011 U.S.-China Security and Economic Commission report and you are so right. Consider reading that link and some of the corresponding report, it's just downright amazingly frightening, yet those reports, commissioned by Congress, seem to go into this administration's wastebasket (and burned on the Congressional fire heap) in some of the beyond belief economic threat, security threat China poses, including being the #1 hacker location into U.S. systems and #1 for industrial espionage.
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