This effect has been studied for some time now, and expectations are that the participation rate will decline as baby boomers retire. What has been happening, however, is that the participation rate is collapsing much faster than would be expected if baby boomers retired in their 60s. There seem to be a lot of forced retirements of people 50 and older in this depression. In fact, I think in the end this will be called the Baby Boomer Depression, because this generation will bear the brunt of the pain of the 2007-2008 financial collapse.
There are several things going on that are impacting Baby Boomers:
1) Corporations are jettisoning employees after they reach age 50. They dress this up as getting rid of expensive staff, and in a way this is correct. Baby boomers in middle management are expensive, and any layoff program that is fundamentally related to reducing corporate personnel costs is going to naturally zero in on people over 50. This is how companies avoid charges of ageism.
2) Once someone over 50 is unemployed, they have a very difficult time finding work at their old salary. Surveys are showing most people in this category take a pay cut, usually in the form of working as consultants without benefits. Others wind up working part time, or in entirely new industries.
3) Baby boomers are the best educated generation ever in the United States; Generations X and Y have lower rates of both college degrees and advanced degrees. This talent pool is being forcibly jettisoned by corporate America, who are now complaining they cannot find talented replacements. What they really mean is they cannot find talented replacements willing to work at 50% of the pay and benefits that baby boomers used to get. Hence the push to increase immigration quotas for cheap but educated foreign labor. The boomers, in the meantime, are left out to pasture when they would otherwise expect to be working in their peak earning years.
4) Baby boomers are very poorly prepared for the forced retirement being pushed on them. Those who have no college degree tend to have no savings. Those who saved up some money during their careers have seen their 401k's damaged, and now interest income on fixed income investments like bonds has been cut to near zero in order to transfer wealth from savers to the banks. As a consequence, many are eating into their capital from savings. This could last a few more years, but eventually people will run out of savings - it is already happening to many. As of now, the average cash savings of a baby boomer is $10,000 - of course this is heavily skewed and the wealthy boomers have hundreds of thousands or millions in savings. But overwhelmingly, this generation will enter retirement with nothing, because there are few that are wealthy, and tens of millions with no assets and eventually no income.
5) Many baby boomers will ultimately find themselves around age 60 out of work, unemployable, and impoverished. This process has begun and can only accelerate. If they do get work, it will be part-time with no benefits, providing just enough income to live a subsistence life. This is where both chance and life style choices will play a role, because at some point after age 60 everyone sooner or later develops a debilitating and ultimately fatal disease. Many baby boomers are already entering their 60s with problems relating to being overweight, having diabetes, etc. Though there will be a desperate demand by baby boomers to continue to work, this vast pool of people will, in five or ten years time, have few members who will be able to work even part time.
6) Add to this picture the fact that both Democrats and Republicans are now looking at ways to cut back on Social Security and Medicare, and you have a social disaster in the making. Nobody is talking about it now, but by 2020 they will be. In the next eight years the problem will slowly become evident. People have their pride; baby boomers will live in poverty quietly, band together for support, move in with their children, and the desperate will resort to suicide, which will include those who will want to leave something of their remaining assets to their children. You simply won't hear much about it because the country doesn't want to hear about it - it doesn't fit into the rugged individualism motif that the Republicans sell - a motif that has destroyed the sense of community the country used to have. Eventually, though, even Republicans will get tired of the poverty and desperation they are experiencing, or their parents are going through.
7) Whether the US will have any resources left to devote to these problems is unclear. Depending on interest rates, much of the tax revenue received by the federal government will be going to paying interest on its debt. The only other option will be to dismantle the military-industrial complex as a luxury the US can no longer afford. Expect the debate to be framed as a choice between being a superpower or taking care of the needs of the elderly.
I want to emphasize some of the points in 4) and 5). We are at the beginning of the baby boomer retirement wave. Talk right now is of people working until they are 70 or 80, because the first wave of retirees are now showing they are still healthy enough to work. By the time they reach 70 - if they do - most simply will not be physically or mentally able to work. We will have to abandon the idea that this generation can keep working well beyond age 65. Only a minority of this group will be able to do that, whichis true in any generation. The rest will have to be supported by the country or left to die, because they will have no source of income.
It would ease the pain a bit. Part of my fun this weekend will be reading The Economic Populist to find out if there is any merit to retirement lowering the labor participation rate! Sunday Morning Comics! Great Blog. Thanks for your efforts.
So, my plan is to examine, by age bracket, the actual real number of retired, going off of Census 2010 vs. the labor participation rates for those age brackets.
I don't buy this claim period. I already proved young people simply cannot get a job, they simply are not all in school as claimed earlier.
Then, we know absolutely there is institutionalized age discrimination, people lost home equity from 401ks plus their jobs. Last I heard the majority of people over 50 are reporting they now must work til they drop.
I have to go hunt data series, do a host of number crunching plus graph all of this up, so hold on.
I plan on analyzing labor market data all weekend! (hey, what do you do for fun?) and labor participation rates is a huge one I'm working on.
That's what I am saying. On the rest of your points, I sure as hell won't argue. But I'm sorry, yes I know and we're written many an article on the Fed's secret loans and on and on, but frankly when it comes to these bozo's in Congress, I'd rather have the Federal Reserve. I'm sorry but these people are just stuck on stupid when it comes to basic econ 101.
They want to destroy social safety nets, EOM, they do not care what the statistics say, what's the best path to provide plus reduce deficits, how the health care sector is a scam and ripping off America blind....
They just want their little philosophies and damn the facts. While the Fed may be in bed with the Banksters, giving secret loans to foreign banks, Jesus, at least they can calculate a spreadsheet!
Robert, do you think this is a shift in labor participation rates because of the boomers?
Many two income boomer families are adapting to one as children leave college and mortgages are paid off or refinanced at lower rates for longer terms. We just did and both of us are lucky enough to have jobs. But we could do it on one income if disaster strikes.
My thought is maybe the second earner if unemployed isn't planning to come back to the workforce. Is that cliff dive on the EMRATIO maybe ten years of dropouts consolidated into one by necessity?
Better 50+ second earners then young adults who are currently raising our next generation. They need their jobs very badly. If this is the case at all.
I'm just putting it out there that I suspect the participation rate and the EMRATIO will not bounce back to pre-recession levels but its not the end of us.
>Literally the committee accused Bernanke of designing fiscal policy. Gee wiz.<
Do you mean by that to say you think it's funny? Or find it so obvious it's, like, DUH? Or are oblivious to that reality?
To reiterate, yes, the international banksters are going to do to the US, which is to say, us, what they are now doing to Greece. Just as Greece's government is packed with traitors to Greeks, so is ours filled to overflowing with bipartisan traitors to America, who will sell us down the river to the glue factory to make sure they and their bankster buddies privatize everything public, put it on the market for sale to others of the international 1%, and reap the benefits of stolen goods they have no business selling while the American people had nothing to do with the fiscal policy set by the Fed, which is a private, not public, for-profit scam, in part composed of member banks that are foreign, as well as domestic banks that hate the people they steal from.
And i hope you don't think we aren't going to go down swinging, and take as many pigs as we can down with us, if it comes to that. You are forewarned, be prepared to duck.
U-6 is a ratio and now based on levels incorporating the 2012 Census, new population adjustments. Check back in a few hours, I will be publishing overviews on all of this.
This umemployment report has so many adjustments it's confusing. But don't worry, we amplify the unemployed and not counted, the underemployed and the ignored....I just make a point to have it been statistically valid, from the raw data, so hold on and bear with us and check back. I'll get U-6 up soon.
That's not correct. Those 1.75 million did not go back to school. What's happened is a major population adjustment by incorporating the 2010 Census data. December used the 2000 Census data and extrapolated monthly statistical adjustments via an algorithm, with yearly benchmark adjustments done by real world data. But the base of all of these estimates was the 2000 Census data. This month is 2010.
That said, we've already looked at the claim all of those young people are in school, or claim that all these people retired or magically returned to the 1950's and don't need to work. That is 100% false.
See this article, Employment will take a decade to recover, where a series of education enrollment rates are calculated and labor participation rates for those between 18-24 are calculated. Sorry, those young people did not all magically go to school.
We go into excruciating detail on these reports and we're working on them right now. Bear in mind we have mathematical and statistical backgrounds. I personally am not going to slam the BLS, unwarranted here, (this is not my article), so check back when we publish and hopefully explain this month employment report.
How did the U6 number also go down? Is that in the adjustment? Seems to me if some 1.7 million went out of the workforce then U6 should have increased rather dramatically.
"Well, maybe not entirely nothing. The government has got a lot better in focusing everyone’s attention on only one part of the story – the part where 243,000 people supposedly now have a job, while 1,752,000 who have given up are to be forgotten and made invisible. Except you’ll be able to see them – they will be those people down the street who have lost their home, and are now sleeping every night in their new car."
Your write-up was excellent, thank you for your in-depth analysis of the current data and pointing out the full picture more clearly.
I enjoyed the read, but you could have just pointed me to the last paragraph and I would have gotten the most important stuff :)
I have been selling IT services in the SAP space for 13 years. I have watched as I give away 80-90% of the jobs to H1B's instead of Americans. Where are all the Americans and why don't they get some training in SAP skills so I can use them. These are high paying contractor and full-time jobs for the majority of the Fortune 1000. On the flip side Indians will lie cheat, steal and fabricate their resumes to just try and get ahead. They muck up the industry and give it a bad name for the good Indian resources.
The biggest fraud that is being put on the American IT industry and workers is the usage of H1B's and temporary IT visa workers coming over on L1's and being put to work on USA projects. These workers are not paid a fair comparable USA based rate and thus compete unfairly against US based IT service providers who do not have access to the low cost unfairly priced Indian labor. The last part of the equation is now the Indians have decision makers in high positions within the US companies and close the loop on US based IT providers as they give the jobs to their buddies at Wipro, TCS and Infosys. Wake up America before it's too late. Use your own USA based companies to fill your jobs. Keep the money in America and not funneled off to India along with all the jobs.
Your 1,752,000 people includes those that went back to school and those that are no longer looking for work because they have decided to start a family or take care of loved ones. These people have always been part of the population. Don't try to scare people with statistics. Today's job numbers is good news. Last month the numbers weren't real because of the temp workers for the holidays, this month it's because of people going back to school. Next month you will blame the it on something else like tax preparation. Stop trying to put a damper on good news.
Every month we dig into labor participation rates, not in the labor force rates and go into excruciating detail on how the BLS calculates the rates and population. You can bet many in the press are going to report this month incorrectly.
They incorporated the 2010 Census data. We'll be analyzing this all week but just on first pass it's hard to believe a labor participation rate of -0.3 percentage points when we see "Hispanic" population controls jump through the roof.
Certainly nice headline buzz. About to write up (on the left hand column) some number crunching overviews.
On layoff announcements, we have Microsoft announcing some huge layoff (while they claim they cannot find technical workers), a slew of pharmaceutical companies and then some of the other ones you mention.
This has nothing to do with "socialism", unless one wants to look at Communist China and how they craft policy to undercut western economies....
and it does have much to do with exchange rates. fiat currency, I have no idea what you mean. China manipulates their currency by pegging the RMB artificially low to the dollar and it's not floating.
This problem is not solely in the USA. It plagues western civilization which has embraced the idiotic combination of technology transfer, free trade, socialism, and fiat currency.
The eastern countries are going to eat our lunch and there is no stopping this trend until it bottoms out.
It appears most of the job growth was in crappy service types of jobs and this generally has been the overall job growth. We've replaced our middle class income jobs with burger flipper, retail sales and leisure and hospitality.
We're going to go in depth on what types of jobs are being created after the January BLS payrolls report is released.
That's why I do these things, these economic report overviews. I'm not sure I bridge that well to explaining what the numbers say to people who don't want to follow the numbers but I know one huge thing, most in the financial press get these report overviews wrong most of the time. All of them do not go into this level of detail, no graphs (Thank you St. Louis FRED dev. team).
So, when this was released we saw a flurry of headlines on how consumer spending wasn't so hot, when that's not the story here. It is why did inventory build up accelerate so much and the second story proves these austerity freaks just do not get how government spending is economic activity and spawns growth. This month's decline really spells that out, the role of government spending in the economy.
A final story is imports. I can almost guarantee those numbers will increase and lower GDP on the 2nd revision. Trade data comes in slowly but it's pretty clear imports have increased (not adjusted for prices) by the monthly trade data.
That inventory acceleration, which can show future economic demand picking up, I don't think so, I think it's a huge miss in what they thought demand would be right now......so that's very bad news for 2012 GDP if that is true.
I'll try to monitor the inventory month data reports so we can get a feel for what's happening here.
Thanks for this lastest fiction. So interesting that elites manage to get "their man" (or woman) on the NYT best sellers lists, on TV, in the press spinning their tall tales of economic fiction. Nobody who has a clue listens to these people, yet there they are, still getting press and airtime.
This effect has been studied for some time now, and expectations are that the participation rate will decline as baby boomers retire. What has been happening, however, is that the participation rate is collapsing much faster than would be expected if baby boomers retired in their 60s. There seem to be a lot of forced retirements of people 50 and older in this depression. In fact, I think in the end this will be called the Baby Boomer Depression, because this generation will bear the brunt of the pain of the 2007-2008 financial collapse.
There are several things going on that are impacting Baby Boomers:
1) Corporations are jettisoning employees after they reach age 50. They dress this up as getting rid of expensive staff, and in a way this is correct. Baby boomers in middle management are expensive, and any layoff program that is fundamentally related to reducing corporate personnel costs is going to naturally zero in on people over 50. This is how companies avoid charges of ageism.
2) Once someone over 50 is unemployed, they have a very difficult time finding work at their old salary. Surveys are showing most people in this category take a pay cut, usually in the form of working as consultants without benefits. Others wind up working part time, or in entirely new industries.
3) Baby boomers are the best educated generation ever in the United States; Generations X and Y have lower rates of both college degrees and advanced degrees. This talent pool is being forcibly jettisoned by corporate America, who are now complaining they cannot find talented replacements. What they really mean is they cannot find talented replacements willing to work at 50% of the pay and benefits that baby boomers used to get. Hence the push to increase immigration quotas for cheap but educated foreign labor. The boomers, in the meantime, are left out to pasture when they would otherwise expect to be working in their peak earning years.
4) Baby boomers are very poorly prepared for the forced retirement being pushed on them. Those who have no college degree tend to have no savings. Those who saved up some money during their careers have seen their 401k's damaged, and now interest income on fixed income investments like bonds has been cut to near zero in order to transfer wealth from savers to the banks. As a consequence, many are eating into their capital from savings. This could last a few more years, but eventually people will run out of savings - it is already happening to many. As of now, the average cash savings of a baby boomer is $10,000 - of course this is heavily skewed and the wealthy boomers have hundreds of thousands or millions in savings. But overwhelmingly, this generation will enter retirement with nothing, because there are few that are wealthy, and tens of millions with no assets and eventually no income.
5) Many baby boomers will ultimately find themselves around age 60 out of work, unemployable, and impoverished. This process has begun and can only accelerate. If they do get work, it will be part-time with no benefits, providing just enough income to live a subsistence life. This is where both chance and life style choices will play a role, because at some point after age 60 everyone sooner or later develops a debilitating and ultimately fatal disease. Many baby boomers are already entering their 60s with problems relating to being overweight, having diabetes, etc. Though there will be a desperate demand by baby boomers to continue to work, this vast pool of people will, in five or ten years time, have few members who will be able to work even part time.
6) Add to this picture the fact that both Democrats and Republicans are now looking at ways to cut back on Social Security and Medicare, and you have a social disaster in the making. Nobody is talking about it now, but by 2020 they will be. In the next eight years the problem will slowly become evident. People have their pride; baby boomers will live in poverty quietly, band together for support, move in with their children, and the desperate will resort to suicide, which will include those who will want to leave something of their remaining assets to their children. You simply won't hear much about it because the country doesn't want to hear about it - it doesn't fit into the rugged individualism motif that the Republicans sell - a motif that has destroyed the sense of community the country used to have. Eventually, though, even Republicans will get tired of the poverty and desperation they are experiencing, or their parents are going through.
7) Whether the US will have any resources left to devote to these problems is unclear. Depending on interest rates, much of the tax revenue received by the federal government will be going to paying interest on its debt. The only other option will be to dismantle the military-industrial complex as a luxury the US can no longer afford. Expect the debate to be framed as a choice between being a superpower or taking care of the needs of the elderly.
I want to emphasize some of the points in 4) and 5). We are at the beginning of the baby boomer retirement wave. Talk right now is of people working until they are 70 or 80, because the first wave of retirees are now showing they are still healthy enough to work. By the time they reach 70 - if they do - most simply will not be physically or mentally able to work. We will have to abandon the idea that this generation can keep working well beyond age 65. Only a minority of this group will be able to do that, whichis true in any generation. The rest will have to be supported by the country or left to die, because they will have no source of income.
It would ease the pain a bit. Part of my fun this weekend will be reading The Economic Populist to find out if there is any merit to retirement lowering the labor participation rate! Sunday Morning Comics! Great Blog. Thanks for your efforts.
So, my plan is to examine, by age bracket, the actual real number of retired, going off of Census 2010 vs. the labor participation rates for those age brackets.
I don't buy this claim period. I already proved young people simply cannot get a job, they simply are not all in school as claimed earlier.
Then, we know absolutely there is institutionalized age discrimination, people lost home equity from 401ks plus their jobs. Last I heard the majority of people over 50 are reporting they now must work til they drop.
I have to go hunt data series, do a host of number crunching plus graph all of this up, so hold on.
I plan on analyzing labor market data all weekend! (hey, what do you do for fun?) and labor participation rates is a huge one I'm working on.
That's what I am saying. On the rest of your points, I sure as hell won't argue. But I'm sorry, yes I know and we're written many an article on the Fed's secret loans and on and on, but frankly when it comes to these bozo's in Congress, I'd rather have the Federal Reserve. I'm sorry but these people are just stuck on stupid when it comes to basic econ 101.
They want to destroy social safety nets, EOM, they do not care what the statistics say, what's the best path to provide plus reduce deficits, how the health care sector is a scam and ripping off America blind....
They just want their little philosophies and damn the facts. While the Fed may be in bed with the Banksters, giving secret loans to foreign banks, Jesus, at least they can calculate a spreadsheet!
Robert, do you think this is a shift in labor participation rates because of the boomers?
Many two income boomer families are adapting to one as children leave college and mortgages are paid off or refinanced at lower rates for longer terms. We just did and both of us are lucky enough to have jobs. But we could do it on one income if disaster strikes.
My thought is maybe the second earner if unemployed isn't planning to come back to the workforce. Is that cliff dive on the EMRATIO maybe ten years of dropouts consolidated into one by necessity?
Better 50+ second earners then young adults who are currently raising our next generation. They need their jobs very badly. If this is the case at all.
I'm just putting it out there that I suspect the participation rate and the EMRATIO will not bounce back to pre-recession levels but its not the end of us.
What do you think?
>Literally the committee accused Bernanke of designing fiscal policy. Gee wiz.<
Do you mean by that to say you think it's funny? Or find it so obvious it's, like, DUH? Or are oblivious to that reality?
To reiterate, yes, the international banksters are going to do to the US, which is to say, us, what they are now doing to Greece. Just as Greece's government is packed with traitors to Greeks, so is ours filled to overflowing with bipartisan traitors to America, who will sell us down the river to the glue factory to make sure they and their bankster buddies privatize everything public, put it on the market for sale to others of the international 1%, and reap the benefits of stolen goods they have no business selling while the American people had nothing to do with the fiscal policy set by the Fed, which is a private, not public, for-profit scam, in part composed of member banks that are foreign, as well as domestic banks that hate the people they steal from.
And i hope you don't think we aren't going to go down swinging, and take as many pigs as we can down with us, if it comes to that. You are forewarned, be prepared to duck.
U-6 is a ratio and now based on levels incorporating the 2012 Census, new population adjustments. Check back in a few hours, I will be publishing overviews on all of this.
This umemployment report has so many adjustments it's confusing. But don't worry, we amplify the unemployed and not counted, the underemployed and the ignored....I just make a point to have it been statistically valid, from the raw data, so hold on and bear with us and check back. I'll get U-6 up soon.
That's not correct. Those 1.75 million did not go back to school. What's happened is a major population adjustment by incorporating the 2010 Census data. December used the 2000 Census data and extrapolated monthly statistical adjustments via an algorithm, with yearly benchmark adjustments done by real world data. But the base of all of these estimates was the 2000 Census data. This month is 2010.
That said, we've already looked at the claim all of those young people are in school, or claim that all these people retired or magically returned to the 1950's and don't need to work. That is 100% false.
See this article, Employment will take a decade to recover, where a series of education enrollment rates are calculated and labor participation rates for those between 18-24 are calculated. Sorry, those young people did not all magically go to school.
We go into excruciating detail on these reports and we're working on them right now. Bear in mind we have mathematical and statistical backgrounds. I personally am not going to slam the BLS, unwarranted here, (this is not my article), so check back when we publish and hopefully explain this month employment report.
How did the U6 number also go down? Is that in the adjustment? Seems to me if some 1.7 million went out of the workforce then U6 should have increased rather dramatically.
"Well, maybe not entirely nothing. The government has got a lot better in focusing everyone’s attention on only one part of the story – the part where 243,000 people supposedly now have a job, while 1,752,000 who have given up are to be forgotten and made invisible. Except you’ll be able to see them – they will be those people down the street who have lost their home, and are now sleeping every night in their new car."
Your write-up was excellent, thank you for your in-depth analysis of the current data and pointing out the full picture more clearly.
I enjoyed the read, but you could have just pointed me to the last paragraph and I would have gotten the most important stuff :)
Cheers.
I have been selling IT services in the SAP space for 13 years. I have watched as I give away 80-90% of the jobs to H1B's instead of Americans. Where are all the Americans and why don't they get some training in SAP skills so I can use them. These are high paying contractor and full-time jobs for the majority of the Fortune 1000. On the flip side Indians will lie cheat, steal and fabricate their resumes to just try and get ahead. They muck up the industry and give it a bad name for the good Indian resources.
The biggest fraud that is being put on the American IT industry and workers is the usage of H1B's and temporary IT visa workers coming over on L1's and being put to work on USA projects. These workers are not paid a fair comparable USA based rate and thus compete unfairly against US based IT service providers who do not have access to the low cost unfairly priced Indian labor. The last part of the equation is now the Indians have decision makers in high positions within the US companies and close the loop on US based IT providers as they give the jobs to their buddies at Wipro, TCS and Infosys. Wake up America before it's too late. Use your own USA based companies to fill your jobs. Keep the money in America and not funneled off to India along with all the jobs.
Your 1,752,000 people includes those that went back to school and those that are no longer looking for work because they have decided to start a family or take care of loved ones. These people have always been part of the population. Don't try to scare people with statistics. Today's job numbers is good news. Last month the numbers weren't real because of the temp workers for the holidays, this month it's because of people going back to school. Next month you will blame the it on something else like tax preparation. Stop trying to put a damper on good news.
Every month we dig into labor participation rates, not in the labor force rates and go into excruciating detail on how the BLS calculates the rates and population. You can bet many in the press are going to report this month incorrectly.
They incorporated the 2010 Census data. We'll be analyzing this all week but just on first pass it's hard to believe a labor participation rate of -0.3 percentage points when we see "Hispanic" population controls jump through the roof.
Certainly nice headline buzz. About to write up (on the left hand column) some number crunching overviews.
On layoff announcements, we have Microsoft announcing some huge layoff (while they claim they cannot find technical workers), a slew of pharmaceutical companies and then some of the other ones you mention.
This has nothing to do with "socialism", unless one wants to look at Communist China and how they craft policy to undercut western economies....
and it does have much to do with exchange rates. fiat currency, I have no idea what you mean. China manipulates their currency by pegging the RMB artificially low to the dollar and it's not floating.
This problem is not solely in the USA. It plagues western civilization which has embraced the idiotic combination of technology transfer, free trade, socialism, and fiat currency.
The eastern countries are going to eat our lunch and there is no stopping this trend until it bottoms out.
It appears most of the job growth was in crappy service types of jobs and this generally has been the overall job growth. We've replaced our middle class income jobs with burger flipper, retail sales and leisure and hospitality.
We're going to go in depth on what types of jobs are being created after the January BLS payrolls report is released.
That's why I do these things, these economic report overviews. I'm not sure I bridge that well to explaining what the numbers say to people who don't want to follow the numbers but I know one huge thing, most in the financial press get these report overviews wrong most of the time. All of them do not go into this level of detail, no graphs (Thank you St. Louis FRED dev. team).
So, when this was released we saw a flurry of headlines on how consumer spending wasn't so hot, when that's not the story here. It is why did inventory build up accelerate so much and the second story proves these austerity freaks just do not get how government spending is economic activity and spawns growth. This month's decline really spells that out, the role of government spending in the economy.
A final story is imports. I can almost guarantee those numbers will increase and lower GDP on the 2nd revision. Trade data comes in slowly but it's pretty clear imports have increased (not adjusted for prices) by the monthly trade data.
That inventory acceleration, which can show future economic demand picking up, I don't think so, I think it's a huge miss in what they thought demand would be right now......so that's very bad news for 2012 GDP if that is true.
I'll try to monitor the inventory month data reports so we can get a feel for what's happening here.
This analysis of GDP is not found elsewhere and must be read.
Thanks for this lastest fiction. So interesting that elites manage to get "their man" (or woman) on the NYT best sellers lists, on TV, in the press spinning their tall tales of economic fiction. Nobody who has a clue listens to these people, yet there they are, still getting press and airtime.
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