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St. Louis Fed President Bullard made a remark the other day that consumers are healthy so a recession is unlikely. Consumers are healthy? It is true that the US U-3 uemployment rate is low (3.6% versus 14.70% in April 2020 thanks to government shutdowns over Covid). But even though unemployment is low, consumer sentiment is at its lowest point since 1977. Generally, consumer sentiment is high when unemployment is low, but not this time around. Currently, inflation is at the highest level since March 1980 even though consumer sentiment bottomed-out in April 1980. Here is my chart showing that REAL...

The populist Sweden Democrats (SD) have called for the repatriation of Syrians, Afghans, and Somalis, noting their rate of unemployment and high numbers who have not integrated. Party leader Jimmie Åkesson and migration policy spokesman Ludvig Aspling have said the Swedish government needs to do more to return migrants to their homelands if they rely on state benefits and do not integrate. “Since 2010, Sweden has granted over 1.2 million residence permits, equivalent to more than a brand new Stockholm. Unemployment is almost five times higher among foreign-born compared to native-born,” the pair wrote in a debate article for the...

No matter how much President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party try to tout his supposed economic accomplishments, the president still gets low mark on his handling of the economy, devastatingly low, in fact. According to RealClearPolitics (RCP), using data from April 7-May 17, the president is at 36.3 percent approval rating on the economy, while 59.6 percent disapprove. That may have something to do with how the economic successes that are taking place in this country are occurring in states led by Republicans. Under Democratic control, this country has spiraled, dealing with the highest inflation in 40 years and...

If an administration deliberately wished to cause havoc on the border, to ensure fuel was nearly unaffordable, to create a crime wave, to spark 1970s hyperinflation, and to rekindle racial tensions, what would it have done differently than what President Joe Biden has done? So is Biden malicious, incompetent, or a wannabe left-wing ideologue? When pressed about inflation and fuel price hikes, Biden either blames someone or something else, gets mad at the questioner, or claims former President Donald Trump did it. His administration apparently believes things are going well and according to plan. When polls disagree, his team either...

On Tuesday’s “CNN Tonight,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded to a question on whether the spending in the American Rescue Plan is partially to blame for inflation by stating that “we have a lot of the issues that are associated with those very low unemployment rates” as a result of the American Rescue Plan. Host Don Lemon asked, “President Biden is blaming the pandemic and Putin’s war for inflation. But what about that $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan? The San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank concluded last year, Secretary, that the stimulus contributed to inflation. Shouldn’t at least part of the...

Applications for unemployment benefits inched down last week as the total number of Americans collecting aid fell to its lowest level in more than 50 years. Jobless claims fell by 2,000 to 184,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. The four-week average of claims, which levels out week-to-week volatility, rose by 4,500 to 177,250. About 1.42 million Americans were collecting traditional unemployment benefits in the week of April 9, the fewest since February 21, 1970.

The U.S. added 431,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.6 percent in March, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department. Job growth fell slightly short of expectations, as consensus estimates from economists projected a gain of roughly 490,000 jobs in March and a decline in the jobless rate to 3.7 percent.

New Mexico’s unemployment rate was the highest of any state in January, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. The unemployment rate for New Mexico stood at 5.9%, according to the data, with the District of Columbia coming in last at a rate of 6.3%. Nationally, the unemployment rate stands at 4%. “There’s tons of jobs out there,” said Ruby Quintana, branch manager for Express Employment Professionals in Albuquerque. “I don’t know of (any company) that is paying minimum wage anymore.” (New Mexico’s statewide minimum wage increased to $11.50 in January.) Barachin acknowledged that job seekers...

Democratic Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia introduced the California legislature Bill 2847 which would create a pilot program to offer money weekly for 20 weeks to unemployed people who are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits because they are undocumented. The program would offer $300 a week for 20 weeks to the more than 5 million people without authorization to work, according to the University of Southern California, who reside in the state. "I think it's a very good idea because we know that many undocumented people will be left out of receiving benefits from the state and the federal government and...

Despite a stronger than expected February jobs report that showed an employment increase of 678,000 jobs and a 3.8 percent unemployment rate on Friday morning, the American economy is still struggling to keep up with inflationary pressure and grappling with damage caused by pandemic lockdowns and restrictions according to Labor Department data. Payroll employment rises by 678,000 in February; unemployment rate edges down to 3.8% https://t.co/1Y9cSWJUIB #JobsReport #BLSdata— BLS-Labor Statistics (@BLS_gov) March 4, 2022The report shows that in February, 4.2 million Americans remained out of work "because their employer closed or lost business due to the pandemic," a lasting testament...

By Syndicated Content WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. employers likely maintained a strong pace of hiring in February, pushing the labor market closer to maximum employment, but rising headwinds from geopolitical tensions could hurt business confidence and slow job growth in the months ahead. The Labor Department’s closely watched employment report on Friday is expected to show labor market conditions tightening further, with the unemployment rate resuming its downward trend and a shortage of workers continuing to drive up wages. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell this week described the labor market as “extremely tight,” and told lawmakers that he would support...

President Joe Biden and his deputies at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have dropped nearly all border protections for U.S. graduates, allowing a mass rush of Indian graduates to grab jobs from Fortune 500 companies, experts and foreign workers say. “They’ve opened up everything,” said Jay Palmer, a civil rights, human trafficking, and immigration rights activist, who works with many of the foreign visa workers who are exploited by their U.S. employers. He continued: “The administration has basically taken down all the checks and balances, and they opened the entire immigration platform for any [foreign gradaute] that wants to...

Pushing back on recent pro-worker populism on the Right, the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Strain writes that "workers need a growth-and-participation agenda." The addition of the word "participation" to traditional pro-growth ideas is especially important today. Millions of pages of study and commentary have rightly made the case that economic growth lifts all boats. But while necessary, economic growth without the removal of existing government barriers to work and entrepreneurship won't be sufficient. It can't cure the participation crisis that traps many workers and lower-income Americans. In addition to the money we make through our jobs, most of us find...

he January jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has no basis in reality. The bureaucrats simply made up numbers to make it look like the economy added jobs. The economy actually lost about 300,000 jobs in January. ADP and the BLS’s own report admit that. But a 300,000-job loss would hurt Joe Biden. So, the crooked accountants at BLS made up numbers and handed a headline to the ignorant press. Here’s where the BLS comes out and tells us they simply made up numbers to arrive at the headline the White House communications staff wrote for them:

The Fed, Inflation, And Some Unpleasant MathAt last week’s FOMC press conference, Chair Powell was unequivocal about his discomfort with persistently high inflation. Had the January FOMC been a forecast meeting, he told us, he would have revised up his inflation forecast for 2022 by “a few tenths.” The Fed is set on tightening policy this year. Bringing down inflation through monetary policy means slower growth, but how much inflation and growth will decline is the question. A dirty little secret about the economics profession is how imprecisely we understand the inflation-generating process. The Fed and most mainstream economists have...

Weekly new jobless claims unexpectedly jumped last week by the most since October, with some renewed virus-related disruptions at least temporarily impeding the labor market's recovery. The Labor Department released its latest weekly jobless claims report Thursday at 8:30 a.m. ET. Here were the main metrics from the print, compared to consensus estimates compiled by Bloomberg: Initial jobless claims, week ended Jan. 15: 286,000**** vs. 225,000 expected and a revised 231,000 during prior week Continuing claims, week ended Jan. 8: 1.635 million vs. 1.563 million expected and a revised 1.551 million during prior week Initial unemployment claims rose for a...

Can we chat?Jimmy Carter invented the Misery Index – the combined unemployment rate plus inflation rate – in order to flog his 1976 opponent, Jerry Ford, about the head. As most often happens with Democrats, his own policies led to even more misery and he ended up beating Ford’s misery score by a full 2 percentage points, topping the misery index at 22%.Now cometh Joe Biden with his bag of magic beans. So far his official score is 10.9%. At the time he took the reins, so to speak, the misery index was under 7% and unemployment was on the...

Hiring in December was even less than the revised figure for the previous month, when 249,000 jobs were added to the economy in November. The stalled job growth comes as new coronavirus variants continue to sow uncertainty and threaten the post-pandemic economic recovery -- though the data for December was collected in the earlier half of the month, before the full extent of omicron's severity unfolded. The unemployment rate remains heightened compared to the pre-pandemic 3.5% seen in February 2020, indicating the labor market recovery still lags nearly two years into the health crisis. As of last month, employment is...

The November jobs report is out and the highlight is that US Average Hourly Earnings GREW at a rate of 4.7% YoY. Unfortunately, inflation is still raging resulting in REAL US Average Hourly Earnings DECLINING at a rate of -1.71% YoY. REAL US home price growth is slowing and is at 12.856% YoY as REAL average hourly earnings slowed to -1.7094% YoY. The lowlight of the November jobs report is that only 199K jobs were added versus the 450K jobs expected to be added. At least the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%. Yes, REAL wage growth and REAL home price...

After nearly a full year of massive, consecutive monthly increases in job openings as employers scrambled to find qualified workers, today the BLS reported that in the past few months, the number of job openings in the US finally reached a peak, and reversed materially in November, when the latest JOLTS Job Openings and Labor Turnover data showed the biggest drop since the peak of the covid Pandemic, as a whopping 529K job openings were lost in November, the most since the 1.139 million jobs lost in April 2020. Still, even with the big drop, the total number of job...