damn, people, what

[solarbird]

Looks like another exciting day is on tap: DJIA -258.08 (-2.45%), NASDAQ -65.48 (-2.82%), S&P500 -21.74 (-1.93%) despite a genuinely positive report on jobs (full report), despite the spike in employment rate.

And in the time it took to type that we spiked up to pare off about 20% or so of those losses. Exciting! Follow the bouncing ball...

eta: ...or maybe that number is a little less awesome than I'd hoped. +188,000 non-seasonally-adjusted jobs added via the birth/death model, the highest number in some time. Given the "adjustments" made in January, I think we can throw out the new birth/death model as being not really better than the old birth/death model. So, well, hell. But even taking that out of the non-seasonally-adjusted numbers, the unadjusted U6 number is improved nontrivially. Subtracting it out, about 12.5% of the non-seasonal-adjustment employment growth gets deleted. It looks like that's getting amped by the seasonal adjustment changes, which is annoying, but it still looks like a pretty decent report on the whole.

eta2: I'm waiting for Mish's take-apart, but here's Zero Hedge's; I'm disappointed in him, because he's conflating seasonally-adjusted numbers with non-seasonally-adjusted numbers and you really can't do that; that's bad math. You wrote a bad song, Hedgie! (He thinks he can do it because the seasonal adjustment of the headline number is pretty tiny this month. But you can't do that against the prior month, so it's not meaningful.)

Comments

[solarbird]

See eta above, I was just doing some math. It's still not bad. But yeah birth/death in outer space. By BLS's own stated theory, the number should be negative now, not positive. Um, whups.

The way the rate improvement is good is in the U-3, or headline rate. The U-3 doesn't include people who want jobs but have given up looking, or who have fallen off employment insurance rolls. The U-3 going up indicates that more people have started looking for jobs, which indicates more hope that there are jobs to get. It's a sentiment indicator, in part. The U-6 number - which is a raw number, not seasonally adjusted or otherwise altered - had a more substantial drop, even if a lot of it is seasonal hiring.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Shadow Government Statistics (http://www.shadowstats.com/charts_republish#emp) has their classical unemployment model numbers up. They show real, honest-to-god US unemployment unchanged at 22%, roughly the same as at the bottom of the Great Depression, for the fourth straight month.

Also, lost in all of the arguments about the Republicans' attempt to block "unemployment benefits extension" is that what was being argued about was not an actual extension of unemployment benefits. Link from a couple of days ago lost, sorry, but even the Democratic leadership has drawn a line in the sand: after 99 weeks, everybody is getting dropped, period. And it's been a lot longer than 99 weeks since November of 2007. (One local symptom of this, where I live, is a very high profile political fight over the local Obamaville, "Hope City," a permanent homeless encampment in the old coal-train tunnels under the city.)

Ted Rall put it best, as often happens:
(http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=26&topicid=294)

Combine that with uncertainty about whether or not it's even safe to invest in US stocks after yesterday's painfully obvious software glitches, and I expect the market to have an extraordinarily bad day. Not that I give a rat's hindquarters about the stock market, frankly. But also, thank you Arizona and thank you B.P. (I say sarcastically) for ensuring that an energy bill and an immigration reform bill climb ahead of the jobs bill in the queue, for ensuring that nothing meaningful gets done about decreasing unemployment and promoting economic demand, until next year.

And if you think American politics is ugly now, wait until the first wave of victims of mass layoffs in November of '07 have gone more than a year without unemployment benefits. Some of them will end up on SSDI. (Most of them quite legitimately; if you weren't insane before you spent two years on unemployment, you probably are after.) Which will do to the Social Security trust fund what a blowtorch does to a moth, by the way. The rest? Well, frankly, the BEST we can hope for is that they agree to lie down quietly and die. As horrific as that would be, it beats the alternative: private militias start handing them uniforms and guns. At that point, the Weimarization of America gets serious.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

22%. Motherfucker.

[solarbird]

I don't pay for SGS's detailed reports; how do they calculate their U-mutter? (U-SGS? U-S?) Specifically, I mean. I know that their own consumer inflation numbers have the de facto effect of ignoring imports, which makes them damn near useless. (This is as opposed to their continuation of the pre-Clinton number, which is of value, assuming they're using the same methodology and the same data sources, or reasonable analogues.)

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I don't know, either; I also don't pay for their detailed reports. So I don't know if they're telling the truth when they say that slightly more than 1 in 5 people who need a full-time job to pay their bills don't have one. The reason I link to ShadowStats is not because I think their numbers are scientifically accurate, but because I think they are the only reliable way we have to compare apples to apples. Comparing apples to apples is what ShadowStats' business model is; he's there for when your economic or business model requires, as an input, a number calculated according to an older formula or model. So if we want to compare unemployment rates now to unemployment rates in 1930, we need the best available estimate of what a 1930 government economist would have labeled our unemployment rate, and this is his best guess, based on proprietary calculations that I know he hasn't published, of what that number would be.

For what it's worth, I trust him, for the same reason that his clients do: the numbers that he gets do seem to work.

[chirik.livejournal.com]

My feelings, backed by no actual data, is that employment is beginning to turn around, a little. This is based on the fact that so far /this year/ I've had several (4-5) recruiters (most for specific companies) contact me about open positions, compared to 0-1 for the past several years.

We're still in a mess right now, but ... I'm hoping I'm seeing the beginning of things changing ... I hope?