well these numbers are good right? they look good to me.
Posted on 02/01/2013 5:42:31 AM PST by Perdogg
The goldilocks economy continues as the unemployment rate comes right as expected, or 157,000, a tiny miss to expectations of 165,000, down from the upwardly revised 196,000 (was 155,000 previously), leading to an unemployment rate of 7.9%, higher than the 7.8% expected.
Please! A RINO is a liberal in disquise, FULLY liberal. Romney had some good things to say about ObamaCare, for crying out loud. He knows nothing of good economic policy.
He would be a fiscal disaster as well.
“Stop trying to blame the people who want to return this country to its rightful place in the world. Conservatives are not now, nor ever were the problem.”
I blame all conservatives who didn’t vote for Romney, because now we have Obama again. Think about it. In the quest for purity, we got just the opposite because of the unbending moralists in their own mind who wanted 100% and instead got Zero percent, as in Obama. Thanks a heap. You took all of the rest of us down with you. Approximately 300 million of you alleged conservatives (probably many really Libertarians hiding out in the Pub Party, but not really Pubs), and the others just illogical or not particularly rational, didn’t vote this past election. Well, now you’ve got what you want. And the rest of us suffer for it.
Analysis from Morgan Stanley:
* Mixed report. The payroll results for January were mildly disappointing and the unemployment rate ticked up slightly due to weakness in then household survey measure of employment. However, there were sizeable upward revisions to payroll employment in prior months.
* In fact, the level of payrolls in December 2012 was revised up by 647,000. This reflected the impact of both the annual benchmark revision and the normal monthly adjustments. So, average employment growth over the last three months is now +200,000. And, the average monthly
pace of job growth since March 2011 is now +175,000 — which is about 25,000 higher than previously reported.
* However, it’s important to note that much of the upward revision to employment over the past couple of years was offset by a lower workweek. The index of house worked for December was only slightly higher than previously reported (97.2 vs. 96.9).
* The only notable surprises in the January payroll results included weakness in temp help (-8,000) countered by some upside in retail trade (+33,000). Meanwhile, unusually mild weather appeared to provide some support for construction (+28,000), as expected. However, manufacturing hours were disappointing pointing to sluggishness in January industrial production.
* The uptick in the unemployment rate in January (to 7.92%) was attributable to a 110,000 decline in the household survey measure of employment. The household tally is based on a relatively small sample size and thus can exhibit considerable monthly volatility, but this marks the third consecutive months of disappointing employment results in this survey.
* The labor force participation rate held steady at 63.6% and continues to show signs of leveling off after some big declines in prior years. If the participation rate holds steady and job growth continues to run at +175,000/mo, the unemployment rate won’t hit 6.5% until early 2017.
Alternatively, if job growth runs at 200,000 per month and the participation rate holds steady, the unemployment rate would hit 6.5% in January
2015.
* The labor market is showing signs of some gradual healing but insufficient demand and lingering policy uncertainties should continue to act as headwinds, leaving average monthly job gains stuck near +175,000 in 2013.
Do you track bank-owned housing?
No Evidence of a Pause
Even more attention than usual was focused on the January employment data following the surprising 0.1 percent drop in fourth quarter GDP reported earlier this week. Any concerns that the disappointing GDP number was a harbinger of a more serious slowdown were likely allayed by this morning’s numbers. Nonfarm employment increased by 157,000 jobs during the month, with gains evident across most key sectors. December’s job gain was also revised up to 196,000 net new jobs. Private sector job growth was a little stronger than that, with payrolls rising by 166,000 jobs in January, following gains of 202,000 jobs in December and 256,000 jobs in November. The bottom line is that from an employment perspective, January was pretty much a ‘steady as she goes’ kind of month. The start of the year is always a tricky time to assess the job market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) makes a number of adjustments to their calculations to incorporate new seasonal factors, improved “hard” employment data and better population estimates. We also have to deal with the reversal of temporary holiday hiring and this past year’s fiscal showdown. By most accounts the impacts from all of these factors were fairly minimal. Job growth remains on virtually the same path that it was on previously and key trends, like the budding recovery in residential construction, are still evident in the underlying data. Manufacturing also continues to rev up, with much of the lift coming from the motor vehicle industry.
Benchmark Revisions Reveal Stronger Job Gains
January’s employment report also contained revisions to the prior data dating back to March 2011. The new data have been revised to a March benchmark from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and show that hiring has been stronger than the previously reported pace of around 150,000 jobs a month to a pace of around 180,000 jobs per month. With the revisions the recovery looks m durable. The stronger pace of hiring may also help explain how the economy successfully navigated around the uncertainty and fiscal cliffhangers over the past couple of years. The BLS also incorporated their annual population adjustment to the household survey. The change had little impact on the data. The unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage point in January. The labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio were both unchanged during the month at 63.6 percent and 58.6 percent, respectively. While the unemployment rate rose slightly in January, the jobless rate remains 0.4 percentage points lower than it was one year ago. Moreover, the number of people out of work for six months or longer has declined nearly 15 percent over the past year, falling from 5.5 million to 4.7 million.
Conservatives refuse to vote for a liberal. What's this world coming to?!
"Year over year, REO filings were down 12% in key default states and 14% in auction states. For reference, REO filings were down approximately 20-25% from December 2010 and approximately 40% from December 2009."
Ivy is the absolute best in the business.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-01/how-todays-strong-jobs-report-led-115000-job-losses
Well, that doesn’t look good...
They are such liars in this administration, cant believe a word of any of their reports. Never has been anything like this, Obama adm makes the father of lies look like???
Neither does that...
I love ZeroHedge’s work as it gives another perspective. He’s been decidedly bearish for the last two years and has missed out on some great returns. He is certainly a “governor” on the perma-bulls optimism. Thanks for the link as I had not gotten to that yet.
Meanwhile the XHB SPDR is up almost 1% today. I take the jobs report as a positive for homebuilders as the headline unemployment number is rife with issues. The job growth is in line with averages over the last two years which should be positive for household formation.
Yes, stock market profits are all...14K or bust...
Never mind about those other economic numbers...
And don’t worry about that dividend tax increase, we can get around that...
“In the quest for purity...”
No, it’s not some pipe dream of getting Snow White into the President’s chair - we want someone who will bring this country back to the glory days of economic and military prominence.
In case you’re wondering, I personally did go to vote and held my nose because I couldn’t stomach another four years of the skinny Kenyan.
With no disrespect to Mr. Romney, I think there were far better people from which to choose to run for POTUS. IMO, it’s better to have an administration who knows who we are and are willing, even eager, to fight for us.
The anti-American left is relentless. We should be moreso.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100427054
It’s all good.
“Unemployment would have been worse had not even more adults -169,000- chosen to join the ranks of those neither working or seeking employment.”
As I have mentioned numerous times in this thread, the labor force participation rate is impacted by baby boomers retiring. And since they are the largest age cohort then the participation rate would naturally decline. Now, the question is how much of the participation rate decline is driven by factors other than that. I haven’t seen anyone do that analysis.
Except that...
“3.95 million gains in the 55-69 age group” since Jan 09.
So who’s retiring?
Also, The story has been that people are putting off retirement...
well these numbers are good right? they look good to me.
Then if you assumed that those five million people you added into the labor force didn’t get jobs, that would bring the total number of unemployed people up by five million, to a total of about 17 million. That would bring the overall unemployment rate to 10.7 percent.
This exercise, though, assumes that the entire drop in the labor force participation rate from January 2009 to the present is a result of discouraged people giving up on looking for work. It ignores the fact that the baby boomers are hitting retirement age, meaning that demographics would probably bring down the labor force participation rate even if the economy were booming. Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, estimates that half of the decline in the labor force participation rate “can be traced to an aging population.” The calculation above also ignores the fact that a higher share of young people are going to college, and are staying out of the work force temporarily while they improve their skills.
Because of these factors, it’s hard to know what the “right” labor force participation rate should be right now. It should probably be higher than the 63.6 percent recorded for September — since there are indeed a lot of discouraged workers out there who want to work but have given up looking — but we don’t know precisely how much higher.
From the Washington Post:
The ‘demographics’ story
But a number of economists are arguing that the recession is distracting people from the real story — long-run demographic trends that have nothing to do with the current economy. Baby boomers are starting to retire en masse, which means that there are fewer eligible American workers.
Demographics have always played a big role in the rise and fall of the labor force. Between 1960 and 2000, the labor force in the United States surged from 59 percent to a peak of 67.3 percent. That was largely due to the fact that more women were entering the labor force while improvements in health and information technology allowed Americans to work more years.
But since 2000, the labor force rate has been steadily declining as the baby-boom generation has been retiring. Because of this, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago expects the labor force participation rate to be lower in 2020 than it is today, regardless of how well the economy does.
In a March report titled “Dispelling an Urban Legend,” Dean Maki, an economist at Barclays Capital, found that demographics accounted for a majority of the drop in the participation rate since 2002.
That’s just favorable spin, imo. No more trustworthy than unfavorable spin.
Plus it’s the NYT and WPOST...which adds demerits...
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