Free Republic

When the government jobs and economy report was released last Friday, it wasn’t quite as rosy as we’ve been led to believe: Economist Herbert Stein famously observed, "If something cannot continue, it will stop." Given other readings on the economy, the rapid growth in jobs that was reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 4Q2015 and 1Q2016 could not continue. So, in April, it stopped. [ed. in other words, we lied about jobs growth,again.] Telling lies with statistics is so easy even a politician can do itFriday's BLS "Employment Situation" report was terrible. FTE* employment fell by 296,000,...

Something isn't clicking in the US labor market. On Tuesday, the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — or JOLTS — report showed there were 5.757 million jobs available in the US in March, a near record. Additionally, the number of unemployed persons in the US per job open is down to pre-recession levels at about 1.5 workers per job. In 2010, for example, this number was closer to five unemployed workers per job opening. And while the abundance of jobs is often interpreted as a sign of strength in the labor market, there's a persistent and growing gap...

As President Obama's second term nears its end he has begun a media tour emphasizing what he claims are the positive aspects of his policies. The complicit media, of course, have long worked to inflate positive impressions of Obama’s legacy, and this latest set of interviews is no different. "In two recent interviews, with The New York Times Magazine on his economic legacy and with The Atlantic on his foreign policy legacy, Mr. Obama expressed a common sentiment: He had achieved big things and avoided even bigger mistakes, and yet most people just shrug," wrote Mark Landler for The New...

Should we be alarmed that the number of job cuts announced by large U.S. companies was 35 percent higher in April than it was in March? This is definitely a case where the trend is not our friend. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. firms announced 65,141 job cuts during April, which represented a massive 35 percent increase over the previous month. And so far this year overall, job cut announcements are running 24 percent higher than for the exact same period in 2015. Meanwhile, on Thursday we learned that initial claims for unemployment benefits shot up dramatically...

Ahead of Mother's Day, more and more millennials are gifting their mom the most precious thing of all: quality time with their offspring. An analysis from real estate and rental marketplace Zillow released Thursday found more people ages 24-34 in the United States are living at home with mom than at any time in the past decade. Twenty-one percent of the age bracket lives at home with their mother, Zillow found. In 2005 that figure was just 13 percent. Rents have continued to rise, but income growth for young people has not kept pace. Zillow found that over the past...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The economy is in the tank. It's confirmed. All the April economic news is out, jobs news and everything. So what does Obama do? Come out and spin it. He's doing a presser or some sort of press availability now at the White House timed exactly to coincide with the beginning of this program, which he is wont to do. Here are the numbers that you need to know: 160,000 new jobs in April, the vast majority of them part time. That is 50,000 below "expectations." The expectations are meaningless. It's a bunch of economic experts that...

It appears that the Fed is now officially "one and done" because the only indicator that until recently "confirmed" a "strong recovery", non-farm payrolls, just had a major stumble.  In yet another Goldman jinx which just two days ago boosted its payrolls forecast from 225K to 240K, moments ago the BLS reported that ADP's ominous print was right when it said that April payrolls rose only 160K, far below the 200K expected, and higher than just 1 of 92 economist expectations. This was the lowest print since last September's 145K. Private payrolls rose 171K on expectations of a 195K...

I'm in a discussion about unemployment, and my "opponent" just declared that U3 Unemployment calculation has been the official measurement of unemployment for every president. Obviously, that's ridiculously wrong. But I was looking for a data point to help me drive that fact home, and I can't seem to find anything specific on when the US government began separating unemployment calculation into six categories, U1-U6, and specifically when the U3/U6 categories were established and first used. Do any of you have any information on this, and can you provide a source link? Thank you.

Students of Austrian business cycle theory are familiar with the term malinvestment. A malinvestment is any poor use of resources or capital, commonly made in response to bad policy (usually artificially low interest rates and/or unsustainable increases in the monetary supply). The dot-com bubble that popped in 2001? The housing bubble that similarly burst in 2008? Those were classic examples of malinvestment.With this article, I'd like to introduce a related term: malincentive. While not part of the official economic lexicon, I consider a 'malincentive' a useful word to describe any promise of short-term gain whose long-term costs outweigh any...

Make no mistake: Barry is a just a little economic genius. New York Times Magazine Sunday May 1, 2016Well of course he has a theory. Barry’s got a theory about everything, every one of which has been or will be proven absolutely positively wrong. Butt we won’t let that stop a good story – it’s the Old Gray Lady and you know what their motto is: “We were moving so fast early on that we couldn’t take victory laps. We couldn’t explain everything we were doing. I mean, one day we’re saving the banks; the next day we’re saving the...

If nobody is working in one out of every five U.S. families, then how in the world can the unemployment rate be close to 5 percent as the Obama administration keeps insisting? The truth, of course, is that the U.S. economy is in far worse condition than we are being told. Last week, I discussed the fact that the Federal Reserve has found that 47 percent of all Americans would not be able to come up with $400 for an unexpected visit to the emergency room without borrowing it or selling something. But Barack Obama and his minions never bring...

Soaring Suicides Emerge As a National Crisis Laid to Economic Stall Middle aged people laid off and unable to find work are taking another way out. They’re killing themselves. Suicide rates are soaring, according to federal data released last week. ... People in need of work are twice as likely to take their own lives as employed people, and people fired in their forties and fifties find it hardest to get hired again. That makes boosting economic growth a life- and- death issue.

<p>Yes, there has definitely been an improvement in the labor market since the financial crisis. I am not arguing that point. The financial markets, investors, and analysts eagerly anticipate the release of the employment report each month while the Federal Reserve has staked its monetary policy actions on them as well.</p>

The H-1B visa program was designed to encourage highly skilled foreign workers to put down roots in the U.S. and spur innovation. However, many IT firms are twisting the intent of the program, and using it to hire inexperienced workers at lower pay. Here are five highly publicized instances of H-1B visa abuse. Companies claim there just aren't enough highly skilled IT workers in the U.S. to fill the number of available tech jobs. Perhaps what they really mean is that there aren't enough highly skilled U.S. IT workers willing to work for lower wages and zero benefits. While there...

As cities contemplated doubling their minimum wage, conservatives warned that employers would flee. And that’s exactly what happened. Then as states contemplated doubling their statewide minimum wage, conservatives warned them again; but again their warnings were drowned out in the cacophonies of popular liberalism. So now California companies are already collecting bids from moving companies, and ordering new stationery for new digs in Arizona, Nevada, and of course, Texas. The destruction that minimum wage increases cause is no longer even denied by the left. Their politicians happily proudly admit the damage they do, even as they inflict these pains on...

And so the confusion remains: why did Yellen go uber dove three days ahead of a day in which the BLS reported that in March not only were 215K jobs created, more than the consensus 205K, if below last month's 245K, but in which average hourly earnings rebounded a solid 0.3%, above the 0.2% expected, and well above last month's -0.1% decline. Payrolls:  Wages:  However, the fly in the the ointment was that the unemployment rate picked up modestly from 4.9% to an above expectations 5.0%. This was due to a modest increase in the participation rate to 63%...

With both ISM Manufacturing and Services employment indices collapsing, endless headlines of layoffs, Challenger-Grey noting Q1 as the worst since 2009, and NFIB small business hiring weak, it is no surprise that initial jobless claims is finally waking up. For the 3rd week in a row - the longest streak since July 2015. The last 3 weeks have seen a 9.1% surge in jobless claims - the biggest such rise since April 2014.  And finally, as Challenger-Grey notes, Through the first quarter of 2016, employers announced 184,920 job cuts, up 31.8 percent from the 140,241 cuts tracked the first three...

More Americans sought unemployment benefits last week, but applications still stayed near historic lows that point to a stable job market. […] Weekly jobless claims have remained below the crucial threshold of 300,000 for more than a year, a level that usually corresponds with monthly gains in excess of 200,000. Economists expect that Friday’s jobs report will show that employers hired roughly 200,000 workers in February as the unemployment rate held at an eight-year low of 4.9 percent. …

Did you know that when you take the number of working age Americans that are officially unemployed (8.2 million) and add that number to the number of working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force” (94.3 million), that gives us a grand total of 102.5 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now? I have written about this before, but today I want to focus just on Americans that are in their prime working years. When you look at only Americans that are from age 25 to age 54, 23.2 percent...

California lawmakers and union leaders have reached a tentative deal to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next several years, the Los Angeles Times reports. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is expected to make the formal announcement as early as Monday. According to the L.A. Times, the minimum wage will jump from $10 to $10.50 an hour in 2017 and will increase by $1 every year after that until reaching $15 an hour in 2022. Business with fewer than 25 employees will have an extra year to comply. "The governor and stakeholders have all been negotiating...