I woke up today and flipped on the TV. I wanted to know how bad the employment situation was. That's all I wanted to know.
I flipped back and forth between CNBC and Bloomberg. All I managed to find out was that it was "miserable".
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein
At the five minute mark I started to question my sanity but I kept flipping anyway. Surely they would tell me. It is such an important report. Another few minutes elapsed. A cost benefit analysis was going on inside my head. I'd invested a good seven minutes and that time is permenantly gone. I'll never get it back.
You don't have to make money back the same way you lost it. - Warren Buffett
That also works with time apparently. At about the ten minute mark I finally capitulated. I gave up and turned on my computer. It was and continues to be the top news story. Go figure.
U.S. job losses accelerate
"The economy is just falling into oblivion and it will get worse," said Greg Salvaggio, vice president for trading at Tempus Consulting in Washington.
I did hear a lot of commentary on TV about the stock market and reasons why it might be rallying though. The common theory seemed to be that the employment report was SO bad that Congress MUST do something immediately. Nobody wanted to be short the market heading into what looks to be a very busy weekend for our leaders.
598,000 jobs lost in January. December's losses were revised upwards to 577,000. November's losses were revised upwards to 597,000. That's nearly 1.8 million jobs in just three months. Funny that the financial news on TV didn't wish to repeatedly show me the gory details. Had it been an actual train wreck the cameras would have never turned away. I'm quite certain of that.
Stag,
ReplyDeleteI've been looking over the employment data this morning also. Really bad report.
The longer term picture is even more grim. We've barely had any job growth since ~ 2000. Total civilian employment has barely budged. And it is seriously rolling over. No other post war employment stats come close to the dismal job growth over the last decade.
Asia has seen some serious job growth though. I guess that's good news. I'd be worried if they were competing for our jobs and not just our paper dollars.
The interactive "Fred" graphs st the St. Louis Fed are fun to play with. Try changing the time period of the following link to show employment from 1980 or 1990 to the present. We're flat-lining.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?chart_type=line&s[1][id]=CE16OV&s[1][transformation]=pc2
Maybe my exponential wealth growth expectations need to be reCONsidered.
mab,
ReplyDeleteThe interactive "Fred" graphs st the St. Louis Fed are fun to play with.
Yeah, last night I took real gdp and ran a straight trend line through it in Excel.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?chart_type=line&s[1][id]=GDPC96&s[1][transformation]=pc1
You can probably guess what I saw, using your eyeball as a smoothing tool. I'll try to put a positive spin on it though.
The crisis explained in one chart: Debt-to-GDP
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/crisis-explained-one-chart-debt-gdp/11570
Consider that debt had most recently been growing at a rate six times faster than the underlying GDP and you’ll begin to appreciate just how bogus the recent “growth” really was.
If we want our real gdp growth to improve (or even just stabilize) in a major way we're simply going to need to take on more debt. I propose a mixture of tax cuts and increased governmental spending. It's that simple.
Illusion of Prosperity's Proposed KISS Stimulus Package
1. For every dollar we borrow from our grandchildren we will borrow an addtional two dollars from our grandchildren.
It will be the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) of economic life! That first additional dollar borrowed will trigger an infinite wave of borrowing that will surely solve all our problems.
It's using the I tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on technology. It's ponzilicious!