Morning Market Report

The Provocateur ^ | 09/04/2009 | Mike Volpe

[fiscon1]

The August unemployment numbers came out a couple minutes ago. The economy lost 216,000 jobs however the unemployment rate grew to 9.7% and the market, at least for now, is reacting to the second number. The situation, however, is fluid, and we can expect all sorts of volatility today. Meanwhile, average hourly earnings were up .3% and the average hourly work week was unchanged at 33.1 hours per week. The last three months, the economy has shed 467,000, 276,000, and now 216,000. That's an average of just less than 300,000 jobs for the three months. That's better than almost anyone expected after May's numbers. Also, the July and June number were revised up.

[CharlesWayneCT]

This repeats the pattern of this administration, virtually EVERY number they have released has later been revised to be WORSE than the original.

So I fully expect that we will find next month that August was worse than 216,000.

Of course, eventually the job losses have to stop, because eventually we will run out of jobs to destroy.

We need 100,000 jobs a month to stay even (that number used to be 150,000, but for some reason under Obama the number is now 100,000).

But before we can discuss “even”, we have to make up for the millions who have lost jobs already.

I would have been shocked and scared if we were still losing 500,000 jobs a month. I can’t believe anybody thought this would be much worse of a number (and in fact, the truth is that this number is only a few thousand less than what was expected, so the assertion by the author that the last three months have been much better than expected seems misguided.