The Real Unemployment Numbers

2008-11-08 — seekingalpha.com

Unemployment continues to skyrocket to a number far higher than 6.5% … although this is the official number the American people are told. That number simply does not jive with every anecdotal piece of evidence, sentiment gauge, and the like. Because it’s a government manufactured myth, as we’ve pointed out many times in the past – keep feeding the sheep false figures and hope they don’t figure it out. I’ve long since stopped dissecting a few of the major government reports because they all have been (ahem) “modified” since the early ’90s to show favorable statistics. But since we get new readers, most of whom don’t recognize the “Man” behind the curtain statistics, I pull out some old blog entries to showcase reality.

Let me preface this whole charade by saying “today’s” number will be revised in the future, so the market infatuation with numbers that constantly get revised within 30-60 days is in and of itself, sort of silly – but it is what it is. To that end…

• Employers cut 127,000 positions in August, compared with 73,000 previously reported. A whopping 284,000 jobs were axed in September, compared with the 159,000 jobs first reported.

So when market participants reacted to “better than expected” August and September numbers and stock valuations changed those days – did it really make sense since it was based on a data set that meant essentially nothing? 30 days ago we told you 159,000 jobs were lost – oops, now it’s 284,000. Etc. (We had to keep the real numbers a secret until the election, eh?) So aside from all the other problems with the data – that is one reason alone to basically ignore this data and just listen to the companies themselves – the companies chopping 5000 jobs here, 7000 jobs there, 8000 jobs out there.  (Click link to read further)

…..

The amount of people working part-time for economic reasons surged by 645,000 in October to 6.70 million, following an increase of 337,000 in September. The current level is 2.3 million higher than a year ago and is the highest since July 1993, when the tally was also 6.70 million. No higher figure has been seen since the 1982 recession, when a record 6.86 million people were working part-time for economic reasons.

Continued Article Here

November 10, 2008 Posted by picklerealestate | Stats | Leave a Comment