So glad he's doing it. If you notice, I haven't written much up on the elections because we need to have something real to write about in terms of economic, trade policy. We have "sound bytes" I think currently.
Glad to see you back Okeydoke, I literally had "no Internet" for over a day. I could only get on the site via a cell phone and that was sporatic so I just couldn't do much. We had a huge wild storm which caused trees to fall like dominoes, taking out all sorts of lines.
We're going to have two more storms back to back too.
I am seeking the Americans Elect nomination as an Independent candidate. I am pursuing this nomination so that I can build a coalition of support which transcends party lines and includes the very best of America’s voices calling for reform and better government. Americans Elect, which will be on all 50 state ballots and requires a bipartisan unity ticket, is our best hope of finding a path to meaningful change. With the power of the people, we can fight the corrupt system and put our country before party and reform before status quo. America’s problems are not Democrat or Republican problems that require either/or solutions. We must work together to rebuild our nation, and I humbly ask for your support.
In order to continue this fight, I must get at least 10,000 supporters to vote for me on the Americans Elect website by May 1.
Hi, Robert! I'm still following EP, although not as active as I used to be.
Paul Craig Roberts (March 10) relies on shadowstats critique of the BLS "birth-death model." I know you have criticized shadowstats' methodology in the past, but I don't believe issues of the birth-death model were considered. I am referring to your blog article from last August, linked above, namely --
I gather that there is a suspicion that there is an underreported or underestimated increase in the recent mortality rate in the USA. That would not necessarily be the overall mortality rate but the mortality rate for the long-term unemployed population -- or, at any rate, for the workforce (excluding retired and disabled). It's an interesting problem in statistical analysis, and I am not prepared to cite any solid results in that regard. I doubt that the data have been collected, although certainly estimates may have been made. Of course, there are known rates for deaths on the job, but maybe not for deaths prior to retirement or while unemployed, especially since 'retired', 'disabled' and even 'unemployed' may not be well-defined.
Below is excerpted for review purposes from OpEdNews.com (Paul Craig Roberts column) --
Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that 44,000 of these [227,000 new non-farm payroll] jobs or 19% consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS's estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS's estimate comes from the bureau's "birth-death model," which works better during normal times, but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the past four years.
Taking out the 44,000 added-on jobs reduces the February jobs number to 183,000, but does not provide a full correction. In an economy as troubled as the US economy is, most likely the deaths exceeded the births, but we don't know what the number is. Was it 20,000? 50,000? What number do we deduct from the 183,000? We simply do not know.
Williams reports that seasonal adjustment factors do not work properly during troubled economic times and add their own overstatement to the jobs figure. If anyone could estimate the overestimate of new jobs that results from malfunctioning seasonal adjustments, it is John Williams, but he doesn't provide an estimate.
Most likely, the new jobs did not exceed 150,000, a figure that would merely keep even with population growth and thus not reduce the rate of unemployment, which, consistent with this deduction, remained constant.
Playing catch up on writing but bottom line, all of the headline buzz today on China running a deficit is pure spin. China has a month long holiday and always runs a deficit in February as a result. The country's manufacturing machine basically shuts down. Don't think for a second China is letting up on export flooding.
Most are crappy jobs and health care jobs. I'll have to do a charting of the types of jobs over the last year from payrolls to get a better sense of what types of job creation are going on.
i.e. you're right. Discouraged workers dropped this month but between the "not in the labor force" numbers and people in crappy part-time jobs who need full time, good analogy, the "shadow inventory" of people.
Sheer numbers of employed/unemployed is only part of the story. What sort of jobs are these? They seem concentrated in health care and other industries that do not pay well, besides so many of these jobs being part time. I know a lot of economists are sure that part time jobs will eventually convert into full time jobs as the economy picks up strength. Even if it does, are these still going to be full time jobs at $11/hr?
The point here is that if future job growth is going to be comprised of fewer $40,000/yr jobs and more $15,000/yr jobs, the US is merely on the path of lower living standards, whether or not it can continuously create more than 100,000 jobs a month. I'd also like to know whether pockets of the United States, particularly the inner cities, are looking more and more statistically like third world countries (in terms of rates of unemployment, average take-home income, presence of barter and black market economic conditions, crime, poverty, etc.).
By the way, your Discouraged Workers chart looks something like the housing inventory charts - the same sort of heavy black cloud overhangs the job market as it does the housing market.
The Wall Street Journal published an article on donor harvesting. Beyond the Macabre descriptions and the lack of a EEG test to make sure you're really brain dead, is this:
Organ transplantation—from procurement of organs to transplant to the first year of postoperative care—is a $20 billion per year business. Average recipients are charged $750,000 for a transplant, and at an average 3.3 organs, that is more than $2 million per body. Neither donors nor their families can be paid for organs.
If people cannot be compensated for their organs, why should Doctors and Hospitals? See the motivation here, Good freaking God, look at the profits/business on organs!
Trying to keep up with the dominoes on Greece is a bitch. Safe to say there will be another bail out, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of defaults and it sure seems someone is having "managed" CDS payout agendas.
Of course the country needs to default. They needed to default 3 years ago. Entire thing is about their rats maze of derivatives.
Please keep us up to date though, I wrote up a quick piece simply listing the credit "events" (mainly because Moody's makes these announcements which have global implications then puts up all sorts of crap on their website to get to the actual press release!) but more and more details are spewing out and will continue to do so.
Myself, subtly or otherwise, from day 1 has been saying default, get it over with. CDSes shouldn't even be allowed to exist, not in their current forms.
Plus Austria is bailing out one of its banks that was deep in Greek paper apparently. Greece is only bound by its word to follow through on austerity measures.
$1 billion in corporate welfare for the Austrian bank. I wonder what the attitude of the Europeans is on that suject?
I simply cannot believe MarketWatch made this mistake, but they did. They are claiming the job growth is the best in 6 months since 12 years ago.
Hello, what is it about the 2010 Census and subsequent major revisions did they not understand? Again, the benchmarks are added into January data. Of course it's the biggest jump in 12 years. Year 2000 also had Census data incorporated.
Unbelievable error by a media outlet that usually gets these reports right.
In the above linked paper, the BLS first uses a smoothing function to smooth out the Census adjustments over time, which is key critical to not simply count Census adjustments and report them as "jobs". Then the two surveys are quite different. We usually mention the CPS has an error margin of over 400k jobs per month (which is huge!). The above link they rectify the two surveys to remove self-employed and a host of other adjustments to try to compare the overall trend of employed persons levels from the CPS to the jobs reported from the CES.
Yes, it's all ridiculously confusing but at least the BLS offers up something here so you can compare apples to apples.
For example, Marketwatch claims they are 2.3 million jobs in 6 months, that's very wrong as we stated, due to the end of the year population controls adjustments plus incorporation of the 2010 Census adjustments.
The BLS gives a year over year increase of the CPS, but they smoothed out the Census adjustments. They get, for the year, 2.3 million more employed persons than February 2011.
This report actually came out yesterday and wanted to point out a couple of things with graphs not amplified as much in the press. The amount of cash corporations are sitting on is obscene and making corporate profits off of U.S. Treasuries, quantitative easing and so on isn't exactly production.
STAY IN YOUR HOME! IF WE ALL STAY IN OUR AND REFUSE TO LEAVE THEN WHAT WILL THEY DO?!! THEY SCREWED US TOO. OUR HOUSE SOLD IN AUCTION 6/3/10 WHILE WE WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF BANKRUPTCY AND A MONTH AFTER MY WIFE UNDER WENT BRAIN SURGERY FOR A TUMOR. COUNTRYWIDE SCREWED US AND PROMISED TO MAKE IT RIGHT AND THE NEXT THINK WE NO BofA BOUGHT OUT COUNTRYWIDE AND PUT US IN FORECLOSURE! NOW WE GOT ANOTHER LETTER FROM THE ATTORNEY MILL SAYING WE HAVE TIL APRIL 1st TO VACATE. OF COURSE EVERY ATTORNEY WE TALK TO WANTS $5,000-$20,000 TO TAKE OUR CASE EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE ABSOLUTE PROOF OF ILLEGAL ACTIONS OF THE BANKS. I'M WAITING FOR MY DISABILITY AND MY WIFE IS VERY SICKLY BUT BACK TO WORK FULLTIME AND ALL WE HEAR FROM ATTORNEYS IS "WELL YOU CANT LIVE FOR FREE"! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! WE'VE GONE WKS WITHOUT FOOD, NO GAS, YOU NAME IT AND WE ARE STILL FIGHTING BECAUSE COME HELL OR HIGH WATER WE ARE NOT LEAVING OUR HOME! WE WERE NEVER LATE ON A HOUSE PAYMENT TO COUNTRYWIDE. WE JUST HAPPENED TO NOTICE THAT THEY GAVE THEMSELVES A HEALTHY INCREASE ON A FIXED 7% INTEREST RATE ON PAYMENT # 40! I AM DUMB FOJNDED HOW THESE ATTORNEYS IN THIS TOWN WILL NOT HELP OUT HOME OWNERS LIKE US TO DO THE RIGHT THING. SO I SAY WE ALL GET TOGETHER AND STAND UNITED AND REFUSE TO LEAVE OUR HOMES! IF INTERESTED PLEASE EMAIL ME BACK. GOD BLESS YOU ALL AND KEEP FIGHTING!!
Folks, you might notice we finally graphed up the calculation which includes those reporting they want a job, who are not in the labor force, from the survey. Many have appreciated this calculation, so we finally graphed it all up for you. We kept the series as early as possible to show, since 1994 at least, there has always been a segment of those not in the labor force who report want a job. There have always been, esp. after they changed some of the BLS methods in the 1990's, a segment of people who want a job but are never actually counted in the official statistics.
We've seen many comments looking for this rate so this time I thought you all might like a graph of it.
ADP was 216k private sector jobs. BLS was 233k private sector jobs so it does appear for February at least, the data metrics converse. (great, 1 month out of 12?)
On "job creators", I think you're referring to those uber-rich and executives that somehow need their capital gains and income tax free, since of course they will then just spend that money (ha ha ha, it's called wealth, they keep it!) and somehow boost the economy by buying more private aircraft and yachts. Or somehow executives must have those obscene multi-million dollar bonuses in order to hire someone.
That said, one thing I really like about the ADP report is the breakdown of job creation by small, median and large businesses. We can see large businesses are clearly busy hiring in China and India, not giving a rats ass about the U.S. worker. The above graph tells the same story, month after month.
The article was updated with a report $3 billion in CDS payouts was triggered. That's a large, large amount, although one can imagine the true number of CDS on Greek bonds is enormous, i.e. trillions. If someone knows the number, please write a comment, else, for now we're going to assume the trigger effect was just enough to make GS and other banks who are members of the ISDA a nice handsome profit.
We're late to the data party, but we actually read the reports and number crunch to make sure it's accurate. Lots of information to analyze and it takes a while. We'll have more details soon, I promise.
So glad he's doing it. If you notice, I haven't written much up on the elections because we need to have something real to write about in terms of economic, trade policy. We have "sound bytes" I think currently.
Glad to see you back Okeydoke, I literally had "no Internet" for over a day. I could only get on the site via a cell phone and that was sporatic so I just couldn't do much. We had a huge wild storm which caused trees to fall like dominoes, taking out all sorts of lines.
We're going to have two more storms back to back too.
As of today, March 13, 2012, Buddy announces independent candidacy for President of the United States --
www.buddyroemer.com/
Paul Craig Roberts, relying on shadowstats, uses this no-change in unemployment rate as evidence in support of the shadowstats analysis.
See, my comment over at "The Bloom Comes Off" -- BLS birth-death model
Hi, Robert! I'm still following EP, although not as active as I used to be.
Paul Craig Roberts (March 10) relies on shadowstats critique of the BLS "birth-death model." I know you have criticized shadowstats' methodology in the past, but I don't believe issues of the birth-death model were considered. I am referring to your blog article from last August, linked above, namely --
What's the Real Unemployment Rate?
I gather that there is a suspicion that there is an underreported or underestimated increase in the recent mortality rate in the USA. That would not necessarily be the overall mortality rate but the mortality rate for the long-term unemployed population -- or, at any rate, for the workforce (excluding retired and disabled). It's an interesting problem in statistical analysis, and I am not prepared to cite any solid results in that regard. I doubt that the data have been collected, although certainly estimates may have been made. Of course, there are known rates for deaths on the job, but maybe not for deaths prior to retirement or while unemployed, especially since 'retired', 'disabled' and even 'unemployed' may not be well-defined.
Below is excerpted for review purposes from OpEdNews.com (Paul Craig Roberts column) --
'No Jobs For Americans' by Paul Craig Roberts
Playing catch up on writing but bottom line, all of the headline buzz today on China running a deficit is pure spin. China has a month long holiday and always runs a deficit in February as a result. The country's manufacturing machine basically shuts down. Don't think for a second China is letting up on export flooding.
Most are crappy jobs and health care jobs. I'll have to do a charting of the types of jobs over the last year from payrolls to get a better sense of what types of job creation are going on.
i.e. you're right. Discouraged workers dropped this month but between the "not in the labor force" numbers and people in crappy part-time jobs who need full time, good analogy, the "shadow inventory" of people.
Sheer numbers of employed/unemployed is only part of the story. What sort of jobs are these? They seem concentrated in health care and other industries that do not pay well, besides so many of these jobs being part time. I know a lot of economists are sure that part time jobs will eventually convert into full time jobs as the economy picks up strength. Even if it does, are these still going to be full time jobs at $11/hr?
The point here is that if future job growth is going to be comprised of fewer $40,000/yr jobs and more $15,000/yr jobs, the US is merely on the path of lower living standards, whether or not it can continuously create more than 100,000 jobs a month. I'd also like to know whether pockets of the United States, particularly the inner cities, are looking more and more statistically like third world countries (in terms of rates of unemployment, average take-home income, presence of barter and black market economic conditions, crime, poverty, etc.).
By the way, your Discouraged Workers chart looks something like the housing inventory charts - the same sort of heavy black cloud overhangs the job market as it does the housing market.
The Wall Street Journal published an article on donor harvesting. Beyond the Macabre descriptions and the lack of a EEG test to make sure you're really brain dead, is this:
If people cannot be compensated for their organs, why should Doctors and Hospitals? See the motivation here, Good freaking God, look at the profits/business on organs!
Trying to keep up with the dominoes on Greece is a bitch. Safe to say there will be another bail out, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of defaults and it sure seems someone is having "managed" CDS payout agendas.
Of course the country needs to default. They needed to default 3 years ago. Entire thing is about their rats maze of derivatives.
Please keep us up to date though, I wrote up a quick piece simply listing the credit "events" (mainly because Moody's makes these announcements which have global implications then puts up all sorts of crap on their website to get to the actual press release!) but more and more details are spewing out and will continue to do so.
Myself, subtly or otherwise, from day 1 has been saying default, get it over with. CDSes shouldn't even be allowed to exist, not in their current forms.
or plain set him up, knowing he had a high price hooker vulnerability. I don't think he was too hot of a governor, prosecutor, absolutely.
Plus Austria is bailing out one of its banks that was deep in Greek paper apparently. Greece is only bound by its word to follow through on austerity measures.
$1 billion in corporate welfare for the Austrian bank. I wonder what the attitude of the Europeans is on that suject?
http://tgr.ph/x42VzH
I've always thought that some Wall Streeters put a tail on him to come up with something and they succeeded.
Someone tried "corporations are people my friend" as a legal argument, of course deemed frivolous.
I simply cannot believe MarketWatch made this mistake, but they did. They are claiming the job growth is the best in 6 months since 12 years ago.
Hello, what is it about the 2010 Census and subsequent major revisions did they not understand? Again, the benchmarks are added into January data. Of course it's the biggest jump in 12 years. Year 2000 also had Census data incorporated.
Unbelievable error by a media outlet that usually gets these reports right.
See this and this.
When the civilian non-institutional pop is adjusted, so are the employed levels and the unemployed actual levels.
Caught another professional there with this funky BLS statistical adjustment.
If one wants to compare 6 months worth of data from the CPS on employment levels, probably the closest we can get is this BLS paper, Employment from the BLS household and payroll surveys: summary of recent trends
In the above linked paper, the BLS first uses a smoothing function to smooth out the Census adjustments over time, which is key critical to not simply count Census adjustments and report them as "jobs". Then the two surveys are quite different. We usually mention the CPS has an error margin of over 400k jobs per month (which is huge!). The above link they rectify the two surveys to remove self-employed and a host of other adjustments to try to compare the overall trend of employed persons levels from the CPS to the jobs reported from the CES.
Yes, it's all ridiculously confusing but at least the BLS offers up something here so you can compare apples to apples.
For example, Marketwatch claims they are 2.3 million jobs in 6 months, that's very wrong as we stated, due to the end of the year population controls adjustments plus incorporation of the 2010 Census adjustments.
The BLS gives a year over year increase of the CPS, but they smoothed out the Census adjustments. They get, for the year, 2.3 million more employed persons than February 2011.
This report actually came out yesterday and wanted to point out a couple of things with graphs not amplified as much in the press. The amount of cash corporations are sitting on is obscene and making corporate profits off of U.S. Treasuries, quantitative easing and so on isn't exactly production.
STAY IN YOUR HOME! IF WE ALL STAY IN OUR AND REFUSE TO LEAVE THEN WHAT WILL THEY DO?!! THEY SCREWED US TOO. OUR HOUSE SOLD IN AUCTION 6/3/10 WHILE WE WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF BANKRUPTCY AND A MONTH AFTER MY WIFE UNDER WENT BRAIN SURGERY FOR A TUMOR. COUNTRYWIDE SCREWED US AND PROMISED TO MAKE IT RIGHT AND THE NEXT THINK WE NO BofA BOUGHT OUT COUNTRYWIDE AND PUT US IN FORECLOSURE! NOW WE GOT ANOTHER LETTER FROM THE ATTORNEY MILL SAYING WE HAVE TIL APRIL 1st TO VACATE. OF COURSE EVERY ATTORNEY WE TALK TO WANTS $5,000-$20,000 TO TAKE OUR CASE EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE ABSOLUTE PROOF OF ILLEGAL ACTIONS OF THE BANKS. I'M WAITING FOR MY DISABILITY AND MY WIFE IS VERY SICKLY BUT BACK TO WORK FULLTIME AND ALL WE HEAR FROM ATTORNEYS IS "WELL YOU CANT LIVE FOR FREE"! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! WE'VE GONE WKS WITHOUT FOOD, NO GAS, YOU NAME IT AND WE ARE STILL FIGHTING BECAUSE COME HELL OR HIGH WATER WE ARE NOT LEAVING OUR HOME! WE WERE NEVER LATE ON A HOUSE PAYMENT TO COUNTRYWIDE. WE JUST HAPPENED TO NOTICE THAT THEY GAVE THEMSELVES A HEALTHY INCREASE ON A FIXED 7% INTEREST RATE ON PAYMENT # 40! I AM DUMB FOJNDED HOW THESE ATTORNEYS IN THIS TOWN WILL NOT HELP OUT HOME OWNERS LIKE US TO DO THE RIGHT THING. SO I SAY WE ALL GET TOGETHER AND STAND UNITED AND REFUSE TO LEAVE OUR HOMES! IF INTERESTED PLEASE EMAIL ME BACK. GOD BLESS YOU ALL AND KEEP FIGHTING!!
Folks, you might notice we finally graphed up the calculation which includes those reporting they want a job, who are not in the labor force, from the survey. Many have appreciated this calculation, so we finally graphed it all up for you. We kept the series as early as possible to show, since 1994 at least, there has always been a segment of those not in the labor force who report want a job. There have always been, esp. after they changed some of the BLS methods in the 1990's, a segment of people who want a job but are never actually counted in the official statistics.
We've seen many comments looking for this rate so this time I thought you all might like a graph of it.
Happy unemployment day!
ADP was 216k private sector jobs. BLS was 233k private sector jobs so it does appear for February at least, the data metrics converse. (great, 1 month out of 12?)
On "job creators", I think you're referring to those uber-rich and executives that somehow need their capital gains and income tax free, since of course they will then just spend that money (ha ha ha, it's called wealth, they keep it!) and somehow boost the economy by buying more private aircraft and yachts. Or somehow executives must have those obscene multi-million dollar bonuses in order to hire someone.
That said, one thing I really like about the ADP report is the breakdown of job creation by small, median and large businesses. We can see large businesses are clearly busy hiring in China and India, not giving a rats ass about the U.S. worker. The above graph tells the same story, month after month.
The article was updated with a report $3 billion in CDS payouts was triggered. That's a large, large amount, although one can imagine the true number of CDS on Greek bonds is enormous, i.e. trillions. If someone knows the number, please write a comment, else, for now we're going to assume the trigger effect was just enough to make GS and other banks who are members of the ISDA a nice handsome profit.
We're late to the data party, but we actually read the reports and number crunch to make sure it's accurate. Lots of information to analyze and it takes a while. We'll have more details soon, I promise.
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