The market seems desperate for good news as it responded the the jobs report. It actually was a lousy jobs report! Why markets reacted to the upside on this information is beyond me. Let’s call the headline number “jobsfraud.” If businesses reported information this carelessly they would be taken to court. This graph courtesy of Zerohedge is all that is [...]
employment
Looks Like A Market Trap
The divergence between the level of stock prices and economic activity looks like a market trap waiting to be sprung. Zerohedge summarized the current madness: One supremely smart CNBC talking head summed it all up, “today’s negative GDP number was excellent news,” and sure enough, thanks to someone’s multi-billion-dollar bid at the all-time-highs mid-afternoon, we went to the moon, Alice. Trannies [...]
More Evidence of the Economic Hustle — The Retail Industry
Readers of this site know what I think of the economic recovery. There ain’t one! James Quinn provides his take on retail. Let’s begin with one of his graphs: The bars go the wrong way in the two graphs above. This is not a recovery. It looks like a train wreck in progress. The country is over-malled and over-retailed compared [...]
Jobs Report: “I Am Shocked”
Another Claude Rains’ “surprise” in today’s Jobs Report! “I am shocked, shocked.” When do “surprises” cease to be surprises? When do apologists for the economy revise their outlook so they are not always surprised? In an honest world, one where economists were attempting to honestly forecast the economy, “surprises” would tend to be bell-shaped. That is, the errors would tend, [...]
Did 5% of The Population Win The Lottery?
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes much more. The following chart is a Federal Reserve Chart of employment as a percentage of working age adults. We have all seen it before, I think. Now let’s look at it more closely and explore its implications. We all know the economy is recovering because the Administration, their media [...]
Implement It To See What’s In It
Before getting too excited over today’s headline jobs number, better read the fine print. Here is some sobering detail from Zerohedge: As a reminder: jobs have quantity and quality components. The quantity component was good enough to convince the 10 Year the taper is imminent (if not stocks, which continue to trade dislocated from any and all fundamentals). But how about the [...]
Some Recovery
The “recovery” touted by Bernanke and other Administration sources is dubious. The claims don’t hold up when data are provided. The following chart shows employment. Tim Wallace provided the chart and commented: In our current malaise, we have been at this 5 years and employment is still 2.2 million people below the employment number in April 2008. Moreover, part-time employment is [...]
There Is No Recovery
For anyone foolish enough to believe there is a recovery underway, Business Insider provides a slide presentation by David Rosenberg that should disabuse you of any such notion. Mr. Rosenberg is one of the more astute analysts around. His take is that the Federal Reserve is doing all it can to save the economy but there is nothing it can [...]
How Rich We Are(n’t)
The chart below shows how wealthy and well-off this country has become with Obama. When fewer and fewer people have to work, that is surely a sign of well-being. Or, it’s a sign of a dead economy and lower standards of living. The media has been telling you that everything is going along just nicely. Look in your wallet and [...]
David Stockman Alienates Both Ends of The Political Spectrum
David Stockman wrote an intriguing article which appeared in the NY Times. That it appeared in the Times is noteworthy itself, for it contradicts so many liberal shibboleths the paper has supported (promoted) for many years. Its appearance is less likely to reflect the first steps to Damascus and may be a sign of financial desperation where the need for [...]
Stocks Up, Economy Not
This from Forbes: The Bureau of Labor Statistics guessed that 236,000 jobs were added in February and everybody applauded. Yay, or should we say, “boo.” What most everyone missed is that even the BLS admits in a footnote to its February jobs press release that historically its initial number can be revised as much as 90 percent. A 90 percent [...]
How Stupid Is The American Public?
The cruelest law of all is the minimum wage. It is the most basic law of economics: if the price rises on a good (ceteris paribus, of course), then less of it will be purchased. Labor is no exception. When you raise the price (i.e., the minimum wage in this case), less labor at the low end of the skill [...]