Free Republic

One of the Bidenary impacts to economic analysis and/or economic outcome review has been the inability of any government statistical data to make any sense.Quite frankly, almost every financial pundit in mainstream media pretends the data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) or the Dept of Commerce is accurate. It’s not, and we all know it.Just like every other institution in Washington DC, the systems of economic tracking have lost all their credibility.That said, even with all the pretending intended to prop-up the Biden administration, eventually the results on Main Street are so...

The jobless rate fell in September to 7.8% from 8.1%, though the economy created only 114,000 new jobs, and some of our conservative friends smell a bureaucratic rat so close to Election Day. We doubt the Labor gnomes are manipulating the numbers, and in any case chasing conspiracies detracts from the real news, which is that the job market still stinks. Democrats are celebrating the decline in the jobless rate, which only shows how their standards have changed since President Obama entered the White House. In 2004, they were lambasting George W. Bush for a September jobless rate that was...

Yahoo!Finance reports Most of the unemployed no longer receive benefits Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent -- a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America's 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more. Congress is expected to decide by year's end whether to continue providing emergency unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. If the emergency benefits expire, the proportion of the unemployed receiving aid would fall further. Congress has extended the program nine times. But it...

The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction. Tony Fratto is envious. Mr. Fratto was a colleague of mine in the Bush administration, and as a senior member of the White House communications shop, he knows just how difficult it can be to deal with a press corps skeptical about presidential economic claims. It now appears, however, that Mr. Fratto's problem was that he simply lacked the magic words -- jobs "saved or created." "Saved or created" has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs. His latest invocation came yesterday, when...

For what it is worth - Just heard Jeff Greenfield on CNN say that rumors have it that the job numbers on Friday will not be very good.