EconomicsUSA: Unemployment: 4.4 million Americans — no jobs for a year

Wall Street Journal video (July 22,2k11)
Job Search stretches past a year for Millions, by Sara Murray and Phil Izzo

EconomicsUSA: Unemployment: Jobs down, unemployment up, says CSM, speed bump, not stopl+t

-- CSM material posted by EconoMix

Christian Science Monitor (June3,2k11)

New jobs down, 

unemploy-

ment upuuuuuup! -- 

Is the economy hitting 

a pothole 

or a ditch?

by Ron Scherer,  CSM Staff writer / June 3, 2011

New York

The economy seems to have hit a speed bump – but not a stoplight.

Skip to next paragraph

Related Stories

• Unemployment rate edges up to 9.1 percent
• Stocks close mixed ahead of jobs report
• The 'Great Unemployment Mystery' continues

The latest indication of the slowing economic pace came on Friday, when the Bureau of Labor Statisticsreported the economy created just 54,000 jobs in May, the lowest number since September of 2010. At the same time, the BLS reported, the nation’s unemployment rate moved up to 9.1 percent from 9 percent in April.

Job growth in May was considerably slower than March and April, when it was averaging over 200,000 new positions per month.

RECOMMENDED: Unemployment up? Not in these four maverick cities.

Behind the slowdown, say economists, are the ripple effects on the auto industry from the tsunami in Japan, the adverse impact of rising food and gasoline prices, and a slowdown in business hiring.

“We’ve hit a soft patch,” says Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pa. “It looks like we may have a month or two of subpar job growth.”

The weak jobs numbers prompted a spate of press conferences and press releases in Washington. The Republicans blamed excessive federal spending, lack of progress on reforming entitlements, and the high federal debt levels.

“Instead of more stimulus, more debt, more regulations, and yes, more taxes, the President needs to take a cue from the Reagan recovery and get Washington out of the way of our job creators," said Rep. Kevin Brady (R) of Texas, the top Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, in an announcement.

At the same time, Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, called the numbers a bump in the road, noting it’s important not to read too much into one monthly report. “The overall trajectory of the economy has improved dramatically over the past two years,” he said in a statement.

Response from the market

Wall Street had been expecting lower numbers – but not this low. As a result, the stock market opened with a loss of as much as 144 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. By noon, it had trimmed the loss to 75 points.

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EconomicsUSA: Labor: Trading down -- taking a paycut after a layoff

HuffPo (Apr21,2k11)

refWrite editorial: This is a sobering article of "HuffPost readers' stories" about staying in the workforce on a discounted income (how's that for a neck-jerking factoid of rhetoric?).  I strongly recommend you read the Huffington Post article in its entirety (excerpted below).  And, for reformational Christian readers, I recommend you investigate the Christian Labor Association (USA), founded in 1931 and open to all.  Organized labor of other persuasions are not helping workers make adjustments and holding employers to their responsiblities, at the same time.  Strike-maniacal labor movements, stoking the already-existing of down-employed workers, carefully atuning wage and benefit requirements at negotiating time, are not the answer for most workers.  That's another, in many case even a new, reason why CLA-USA needs to experience growth and development, spreading as well to new industries, in these difficult times.  CLA-USA does not fan the flames of social unrest, calculatedly seeks the best possible negotiating package, and seeks as longterm pluralization of labor relations and workers representation so you never have to be a member of a union you don't approve of.

-- Lawt

Trading Down: 

Taking a paycut after a layoff

The general heading at the above link includes several articles.  Here's Huffington Post's  key report of a painful trend of retrenchment for workers regarding the downsizing of their income (if they get re-employment at all), in the bundle of articles:

Laid-off Americans increasingly 

taking paycuts - and kissing 

their old lives goodbye

NEW YORK -- Susan Goscewski spent 30 years climbing the professional ladder. It took little over two years of unemployment for her to tumble back down.

Cast out of the workforce in December 2008 following the financial meltdown, Goscewski, 59, never expected to go for so long without a job. She had three decades of steady employment history and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon, one of America's top business schools. Her last position, as director of development for a nonprofit, paid $90,000 a year.

Last month, she finally found a new job: as a classroom tutor at a bookkeeping training center, working 20 hours a week for $15 per hour. Even if she works 50 of 52 weeks at that rate, she'll make just one-sixth of her 2008 salary.

"In this field, in this particular organization, I will never see what I've made before," Goscewski said quietly. "And I -- have I accepted that? I'm quite angry about it."

The U.S. economy added 216,000 new jobs in March, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, appearing to bolster claims that the labor market recovery is "gaining traction". But Goscewski and many others lucky enough to find work, any work, still find their old standards of living painfully out of reach.

"It makes me feel good that people are giving me work today. It means they trust me, they believe in me," Goscewski said. "But it still seems like a demotion, like I'm back in kindergarten again. What am I doing? I'm really starting all over again."

While the recovery of the labor market and the broader U.S. economy depend critically on job growth, equally important is the quality of those jobs. During the economic downturn, 40 percent of the jobs lost came from high-wage industries -- yet high-wage industries accounted for only 14 percent of the new positions created in the first year of post-downturn job growth, according to a report released in February by the National Employment Law Project.

EconomicsUSA: Unemployment: Budget cuts will cut 200,000 jobs, says Fed Reserve Chair

Bernanke sees 200,000 hit 

to jobs from budget cuts

By Mark Felsenthal

WASHINGTON | Wed Mar 2, 2011 8:27pm EST

(Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday a Republican spending cut plan would not cause a big dent to U.S. economic growth, but could cost around 200,000 jobs over two years.

Read more of this Reuters 2-page article (Mar2,2k11). Very interesting and stimulating.

-- posted by EconoMix

EconomicsUSA: Biz-generated Agendas: Money Morning, and MarketWatch both suggest alternatives to Obama policies

First off,  MarketWatch has bundled 4 articles under the heading "Jobs and the Economy: Here's how Washington coud get us back to work" (MW frontpage, Oct31,2k10).  The 4 articles may be found at these locations:

•  Nutting: Stimulus worked, but not that well.
       Sea of debt, h+ productivity undermined job growth
•  Gold: White-collar recession, blue-collar depression.
       Loss of Manufacturing jobs hollows out the economy
•  Powell: US ret+rment system ranks 10th -- out of 14.
       Netherlands tops list; China comes in last
•  Delamaide: Report from a parallel political universe.
       Getting our country back from the banksters

Secondly, there's this morning's email newsletter from Money Mornings in a blog-entry entitled "An Open Letter to Washington: How to fix the deficit and end the Bush-Tax-Cuts" (Oct28,2k10):

MARTIN HUTCHINSON, Contributing Editor, Money Morning

Dear Mr. President and members of Congress:

In the months that follow Tuesday's midterm elections, and into the New Year, you all face three very significant challenges. You must: 

• Find a solution to the Bush-tax-cuts controversy.
• Rein in the huge-and-growing U.S. budget deficit.
• And better police Wall Street, which got us into this mess in the first place.

You can solve all three of these problems with a single, simple proposition. And you can do so without having to ask U.S. taxpayers to dig into their wallets or savings.

Let me explain.

-- EconoMix

Click the time-stamp below to Read more ...

EconomicsUK: Growth: As draconian cutbacks and gov-jobs layoffs set in, Brits see 0.8% GDP growth (better than was expected)

Market Pulse (Oct26,2k10) has a newsbrief item that tells us much about the way trends are going for the Kingdoms economic situation.

LONDON -- Britain's third-quarter gross domestic product grew by 0.8% compared to the previous quarter, the Office for National Statistics reported Tuesday. Compared to the same period last year, GDP grew 2.8%. Economists had forecast a 0.4% quarterly increase and a 2.4% annual rise. The economy grew at a 1.2% quarterly pace in the second quarter.

The leading reformational economist, Dr Bob Goudzwaard has long tawt us that the growth ethos was the killer in the economic values of the overdeveloped West. We're in a situation in Europe and North America where we have been experiencing a slowdown in growth to seemingly microscopic proportions, coming on the heels of overinflated mortage losses due to gov policy, collapse of the stock market, and even more the de-industrialization of our core industries (to the del+t of Enviros and pain for our workforce with its 10% unemployment outlook).

Having got what he wanted in the 'overdeveloped West,' and seeing China, India and Brazil unleashed in their hot pursuit of growth, I wonder what our mentor woud prescribe nowadays. Recently, I heard on the Net a brilliant study of macro-trends in the globally economy, by Dr Bob, given at Redeemer University College, Anacaster, Ontario. While I digest these reflections, I still find myself wondering when the GDP statistics arrive quarter by quarter, what is Dr Goudzwaard thinking now?

-- EconoMix

PoliticsUSA: Polls: WSJ offers a credible report on Fed electoral trends re upcoming Nov 2

Wall Street Journal's reporter / analyst Jonathan Weisman gives us the poop on the current state of play (as of October 14-18:  note that a spread of 5 days for an opinion survey in the USA skewers the result; it's bad polling, but in this case nevertheless probably the best around).  I saw the Fox News' commentator Liberal millionaire leftist Alan Coomes just poo-poo any poll that doesn't reflect his own predilections, claiming that the Republicans lead only in "battleground states," whereas everywhere else his Democrats are leading and will prevail, the extreme leftist maintains. Maybe he's correct about the current trend, just two weeks before most voters get out to the polling places.

However, the battleground state of Ohio puts the lie to the ministrations of the Coomes hypothesis.  It went for Obama by a huge majority, it's an industrial state suffering for some years from radical de-industrialization  and unbearably h+ unemployment.  Obama has abandoned his role as Prez to spend weeks out of office (but I doubt he'll return a proper proporation of his pay cheque), campaigning for the re-election of congressional Democrats, especially in Ohio.  There Obama has to mobilize his Black and student base.

His playing of the race card becomes even more glaring in the neiboring state of Pennsylvania, where he spends his second most campaign t+m this round, drumming up Black voters, especially in Philadelphia.  Philadelphia has a notoriously unscrupulous Democratic Party history in elections, and in Obama's first national campaign the Philly voting was bedevilled with violent threats by the Black Panther Party, wielding baseball bats and positioning its demented minions close to the doors of polling places to intimidate Whites from casting their ballots within -- all of which the Attorney General of the USA, Eric Holder, has refused to prosecute because the videotaped vote-corruptors are Black, by his own statement, as reported by a Fed prosecutor in the inJustice Department.  Only Whites cawt in similar activities woud face the strong arm of the law, according to the whistleblowing gov lawyer.

I'm sure the Panthers have learned their lesson, and will be much more stealthy in this round since Holder has given them a carte blanche, so the pantheroids won't want to embarass their Attorney General again.

The WSJ/NBC joint poll is worth reading if you're at all interested in the trends in American opinion surveys among potential voters.  Read and go figure for yourself, I urge.

-- Politicarp

EconomicsUSA: Labour: Construction industry loses jobs nationwide

News today from construction industry email, AGC Smart Brief:

U.S. market loses 11,000 construction jobs in July The U.S. construction job market hit a 14-year low in July, as contractors eliminated 11,000 jobs nationwide. The Labor Department reported that the private sector grew its employment base by 71,000 jobs -- but that growth didn't extend to the construction industry. Some 1.5 million construction workers are out of work, pushing the unemployment rate in construction to 17.3%, well above the 9.5% rate overall. 

Reed/ACPConstruction Data (8/6), ConstructionDigital.com (8/8) 

Construction industry jobs are a key indicator for the overall economy.
It shoud be noted that the Christian Labor Assocation (USA), tho it be a quite small union (proportionate to USA total statistics for USA unions), is active in the construction industry of several states.

-- EconoMix

EconomyUSA: Jobless increase: Impacts and impasse on job creation in the new healthcare-driven American economy

To contrast with UK's unemployment crisis (mentioned in yesterday's blog-entry), here's a recent stat from USA's labour crisis (May 13, 2k10). Jeffry Bartash wr+ts in MarketWatch, "Weeklu jobless claims little changed at 444,000" --

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The number of people applying for unemployment benefits essentially held steady at 444,000 in the latest week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Claims actually fell by 4,000 for the week ended May 8, but the data was revised up by 4,000 for the prior week. The net effect: no change from last week's headline number. The four-week average of initial claims - a better gauge of employment trends than the volatile weekly number - dropped by 9,000 to 450,500. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch predicted initial claims would dip to a seasonally adjusted 440,000.

Uncannily, the number echoes with biblical sobriety -- "And I heard the number of them which were sealed: [and there were sealed one hundred forty four thousand -- 444,000!--of all the tribes of the chldren of Israel" (Revelation 7:4 KJV; see also Rev. 4:1). Am I the only person who noticed that parallelism?

In any case, the Bible verses are a distraction here. We have to retain our sobriety in order to guage the significance of a half-million unemployed workers applying for jobless benefits, pogey, the Dole over the course of a week, as averaged from a four week's total figure -- must give any considerate observer some considerable pause.

These jobless figures of a week's average nearly rises to a half-million, yet the portion of the economy signified by small businesses, which are the primo job-creators, are being taxed into immobility and somnolescence. Obamanomics is staggering under the new healthcare entitlement (praise God for that were there elsewhere in the Fed budget an adequate compensatory move toward spending cuts and paying down the national debt) -- instead, out of nowhere we have an unstoppable oil disaster we can't afford, and ... and ... we're in trouble in the USA economy. We need a public policy of encouraging and incentivizing the job creators, not big business so much as small.

Britain and America must both prioritize now the creation of jobs for the unemployed, and thus the creation of incomes spendable by wage-earners returned to work -- and taxable by Federal, state and local govts in significant part to pay for the budget-prioritization of healthcare (including the 32 million many of whom will be out of work and jobless). Economically speaking, everything else is secondary. Except of course, intelligent regulation of the financial and the energy sectors. We are not finished with our oil addiction, as President George W. Bush, termed it; rather our continuing and returned workers in many places need to drive their cars to get to work, public transit being unavailable in many places across the continent.

-- EconoMix

EconomicsUSA: Recession: Over, proclaims self-aggrandizing CEO

Screaming headline on Yahoo! Finance's TechTicker where, on video, Barry Ritholtz, CEO of Fusion IQ claims potvaliantly "The Great Recession is Over...." despite ongoing "weak employment, weak housing and the continuation" of chronic recession ("what he describes as a mild recession"). Note, "a" in the term "a mild recession." It seems to me that this not a single recession but a series of multiple recessions which will continue to back up on one another but which individually are incapble of peaking and self-resolving in the manner outlined by neo-classical market theory (perhaps a chronic unresolvability due to over-interference of socialist initatives of govt). Note, even Ritzholtz is saying continuation of mild recession will be continued to be accompanied by heavy unemploment, no homes for woud-be buyers.

-- EconoMix

Economics USA: Half a million lost jobs in November 2008

In what seems to be the largest figure for job losses since the Seventies among American workers --533,000 across the month of November -- translates to an unemployment rate of 6.7% of the workforce.

This month, the figure and rate will probably rise (at least marginally). Were that not sufficient a problem in itself, we must also keep in mind that people going thru job loss are likely to be "the lowly borrower at risk of foreclosure" as well. Christian Science Monitor's Mark Trumbull article "Housing: the key to economic survival" (Dec12,2k8) lays out the landscape:

The problem reached a stark milestone last week, as the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that 1 in 10 mortgage holders is either in foreclosure or at least a month late on payments.

President-elect Obama, the Democratic-controlled Congress, and the independent Federal Reserve are all considering new ways to stabilize the housing market.

But attention has already turned away from the loan defaulters, especially those trying to keep up with their monthly payments (mortgaged home-owners), political attention re-focusing itself on a bailout of the "Big Three" American-owned automakers. The specific kind of jeopardy that goes with a jobless worker losing a house, is not identical to that of an autoworker losing a job but getting bailed out in some fashion or other (compensation for early retirement and other schemes to reduce the workforce of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler).

A few days earlier, "Ouch! Borrowers Keep Defaulting After Mortgage Modification" by John Carney (Dec8,2k8, ClusterStock via Yahoo! Finance) reports:

36% of borrowers who had their loans modified in the first two quarters of 2008 re-defaulted after just 3 months. After six months, the redefault rate was roughly 56%. After eight months, 58% of borrowers re-defaulted.

These three inter-related trends are not going to reverse themselves, or shift into reversal as a result of government action in the short run.

Economix