Good evening. Most of this will be material from late last week that I didn't post about because of the
torture obscenities of the US government. I'm still processing that - as well as the near-total lack of reaction to it.
The job report was much worse than expected, and worse than typically reported. As usual, you had the
Birth/Death model making it less bad than it would've been otherwise. This is the same black-box no-explanation model that has added hundreds of thousands of theoretical jobs throughout this recession, and has gone negative only one month in the process. The U-6 - broad un- and under-employment - is up to 17.0%.
But if you look more directly at the data, as Karl at Market Ticker did, you see
huge chops out of the "participation" number, and you see:
Civilian Labor Force: 154,879,000 to 153,617,000 this month.
Employed: 140,074,000 down to 139,079,000 this month.
That's a loss of 995,000 jobs, not 263,000, and the labor force contracted by 1,262,000 people!
This of course does
not include seasonal adjustments and many jobs are genuinely seasonal. But, well, it still affects the amount of money people have.
However, the BLS seems to be preparing to admit that its numbers are severely damaged, with
massive revisions coming in February regarding job losses in the first year of the recession - around 824,000 more jobs lost than actually reported by the BLS through March 2009.
Mish has more, of course.
Automobile makers
took it in the teeth last month as Cash for Clunkers ended, with almost all makers reporting worse than expected declines in sales.
Hyundai, however, did much better than expected, with sales up 27%. Manufacturing
climbed overall, but missed quite a bit to the downside, with the index actually falling while still remaining in the growth range. The service sector, by contrast,
moved into expansion territory, with a robust pickup in September.
Consumer spending rose sharply on "Cash for Clunkers,"
even as income actually fell 0.2%, and the savings rate fell to 3%. This debt-based spending seems unlikely to be sustainable in the face of rising unemployment - still, even non-durable goods sales rose quite a lot, so who knows?
MSN Money reports a bit of a surge in 'splurge'-type buying at retailers, so maybe.
Ben Bernanke is talking about how the US dollar is in no immediate risk. Talking up something in this context is usually a sign of need for reassurance.
The Independent in the UK reports:
Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.
Is it true? I don't know! It's in the interest of several of these states.
As I'm writing this, I see in a bulletin (no link) that the Australian central bank is hiking its cash rate target by a quarter point to 3.25%. That will help the Aus$, as the Federal Reserve has noted yet again it has no plans to move rates up any time soon.
Calculated Risk summarises
various emergency budget cuts in state governments as income taxes fall - New York State receipts are down 36%.
Elliot Wave International
says stocks are headed sharply down, by the same indicator that they used to predict a couple of other major declines, but they're also known for missing bull markets. Yahoo Finance reports
500-600 more bank failures predicted over the next year, And I don't know anything about this blogger, but
it is true that "insider" stockholders have sold heavily into this stock market rally, with a huge "sell" bias. Be warned.
Sorry this is a bit slapdash tonight, my heart's not really in it. Good luck tomorrow and the rest of the week.
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