Posted on 05/07/2013 6:41:42 AM PDT by blam
The US Economy Is The Envy Of The World Again, And Just Like That The Bears Have Been Annihilated
Joe Weisenthal
May 7, 2013, 4:44 AM
Just two and a half weeks ago, the bears were starting to feel good.
Markets around the world seemed to be rolling over. Commodities were falling. People were talking about deflation.
And then, the market turned, and then we got Friday's strong jobs report.
Now the market is back to making new highs again, and the market bears are crushed.
A new note from Olivier Korber at SocGen is titled "US payrolls annihilated 'sell in May.'" Basically, whatever temptation there was to dump risky assets starting in May (as the cliche goes) has been sapped.
Separately, Steven Englander of Citi wrote yesterday:
The implications of the payroll release for FX is that the US is back on track as an outperformer (admittedly modest, but still standing out) in a world of underperformance, From a Fed perspective labor market improvement since last year has been steady but clear, with household and payroll employment and aggregate hours converging to a 1.5% y/y gain (Figure 1, upper panel). This is probably at the low end of what the FOMC core would consider acceptable.
This idea of the US being the one country that you "must own" was a huge theme in markets during the first quarter. Everyone sensed that the US was going towards liftoff, and that regardless of whatever else, exposure to the US was a must.
The same takeaway was offered from trader Mark Dow, who tweeted yesterday.
For now, the US is back to being the envy of the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
You mean a prosperous America where are man on one salary could support a family and retire comfortably?
It's been destroyed by Free Traitors who sold us out to Red China and other Globalist slave plantations.
Knowledge or service workers are what is needed now
I've been hearing that line of BS for over twenty years.
Americans can continue purchasing luxury items on more or less fixed wages.
What? I suppose they are going to buy luxury items with credit cards and unemployemnt checks.
There are some real ominous undercurrents to this, however.
For example, consumer food products, in many cases, have gotten sudden “dollar inflation”. That is, suddenly prices for many processed goods have jumped $1 each. However, at the same time, other goods, especially some produce, are experiencing strong deflation or inflation.
For example, for the last five years, the price of potatoes per 100 kg, has vacillated between $1,300 and $300, at least twice. In the last few months at the retail level, Russet potatoes could be bought at 10 pounds for a dollar.
Something is happening here, but what it is is not exactly clear.
That is not true. They are not considered in the job pool.
WHY?
The fundamentals that led to 2008 have not changed. When you look at the design margin, you could argue current environment is even worse than that time.\
..............
Each year for the last three years the USA has increased oil production nearly 1 million barrels@ day. The USA is on track to do the same thing this year and likely each year here after during the coming decade.
This kind of production growth is what the saudis experienced from 1969 -1974;
It represents an incredible growth in financial and therefor political power.
The USA is basically being recapitalized.
any supposed economics article which begins with “Friday’s strong jobs report” is bound to be Bullsh*t!
Considering that the average increase in NFP from January 1981 (when Reagan took office) through now is +115K then the +165K last week is pretty strong.
Massive corporate taxation, limitless legal vulnerability, crushing environmental regulation and pro-Union arbitrary Government: these are why industry chooses to locate away from the USA.
Protectionism would be the final nail in the coffin. The last vestiges of American industry would be turned into feather-bedded welfare cases, and freeborn Americans would be forced to buy their stuff from the Government store.
Protectionism would also increase Government power. The Democrats will collect all of that lovely tariff money and spend it on union pension bailouts or some damn thing.
America has tied its own hands behind its back with a ludicrous knot of EPA regulations, crushing taxation and arbitrary Government (just ask Gibsons guitars).
America needs to untie those knots - not wrap itself up in more of them in a fit of misplaced faux-patriotic anger.
The reason why the American worker can no longer support a family is Government.
The average American worker is paying to support a metric frack-ton of Government entitlement schemes - he's paying for Solyndra, GM Volts, lobster for EBT-users and disability checks for America's bizarrely-heavily disabled workforce.
He's having his money devalued to pay for Union pensions, Freddie Mac mortgages, Fannie Mae mortgages, FHA mortgages and to support Medicare A through D.
And now Obamacare.
No wonder his wife has to go out to work.
And surprise surprise, American companies have to pay for this junk AND face illegal and arbitrary seizure of their property (again: see Gibson's guitars). Lucky for them they can literally take their business elsewhere.
Great chart by Bill McBride at Calculated risk. I’ve used it dozens of times. McBride’s blog is a fantastic resource particularly for housing related data.
So let’s make the math easy: 3.5% left to go to get back to pre-recession levels.
That excludes bringing people back from the benches of SSDI, low paying jobs for which they are overqualified, part time work, premature retirement, etc.
With a work force of 138M
http://www.numberof.net/number-of-employed-people-in-the-usa/
To abuse the math slightly, that means we need 3.5% more than 138M, or about 4.8M hires.
At the rate you cited of 165K net hires, the months to pre-recession employment would be 4.8M / 165K, or about 30 more months. Two and a half years more.
So you think it is somehow on track for a jobs recession to continue at the slovenly pace of 165K net job adds, extending the return to pre-recession employment of nearly SEVEN years?
I’ll stick with my point that >350,000 (or more!) net job adds is the velocity with which we can return to pre-recession levels in something like a timely historical fashion. See the slope of all the other post-war recessions. They ALL grew faster. We’re in the 0bameconomy, and you’re accepting it.
DON’T ACCEPT THE STATUS QUO. IT SUCKS!
See 72, with apologies for tone. I’m not attacking. I’m suggesting we need to politically slaughter the opposition for creating the worst economic climate since Roosevelt almost killed capitalism.
It is going to burst...
The point on the number of NFP improvement is valid. And it would be faster with 500K or 1000K. Point was that the average over the last 30 years is nowhere near that. Given the +165K average it will take until 2015/16 until we get back to pre-recession levels.
Opinion and reasoning are not fact. Reality is that stock prices going up means more hiring and lowering stock prices mean layoffs. The hard numbers were posted above. Things are what they are whether we agree or understand.
That settled, we should be also able to understand first that corps are able to sell stock only when buyers will later be able to sell the shares at a profit. Market niches and CEO's with poor track records don't get stock buyers. Next lets understand that the IPO (Initial Public Offering) is not the only time shares are sold. Companies routinely issue more shares when the stock price goes up and then they announce buy-backs when it falls. Finally, most insiders own shares or stock options. It's legal, widely understood, and it provides an extra incentive for superior corporate leadership.
According to the BLS website 193K jobs were added to the NFP by the "Net Birth/Death Adjustment".
This is a theoretical adjustment made to account for all the new job-creating businesses that appeared in the last month and which otherwise wouldn't appear in the figures.
This adjustment makes sense - sort of - when the economy is booming. But we can't add 193K (!) to the figures and then claim that the economy is doing well just because +165K is pretty strong.
We have to remember that BLS figures in the 21st century are basically the most tortured State statistics on earth - at any rate since the USSR stopped reporting wheat production. They're maybe 1% actual data and 99% unaudited adjustments. They're so mangled: they're really only useful for supporting the Government's agenda.
165,000 jobs is relatively poor, about half the number of new jobs we’d need to turn things around for the better.
The problem is that the “true” unemployment rate continues to increase (now acknowledged to have gone up to 13.9% per the BLS). The labor participation rate is the lowest it has been in decades, and it ain’t getting any better what with the administration’s anti-jobs, anti-business policies.
Many of the “new” jobs mentioned in the (deliberately misleading) headlines are in fact just part-time gigs replacing former full-time positions. Indeed, these account for MORE than the reported net number of “new jobs” — 278,000 new part-time situations (meaning that the number of full-time jobs went down, not up).
Note also that this is reflected in the average number of hours of employment per worker, down another 2 hours. (All this while the average wage level continues to erode, go down, too.)
The labor participation rate is the lowest its been in 35 years!!!!!!!!! Sorry, but this is a disaster, not a “favorable jobs report.”
--and that's where we earn our pay.
Americans have fallen into a sever partisan polarization to the point that no matter what happens half the US says it 'proves' all is well and the other half says it 'proves' all is lost. Meanwhile you and I get to enjoy a privileged inside track simply because we know the President doesn't control everything.
OK so we have to put up with so many people saying we're wrong, but hey it sure pays well...
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