[mikemike]

Where are they Mr. President?

U.S. employers added 96,000 jobs last month

The US would need to be adding 300K/month if we wanted to get down to 6% unemployment by putting people back to work in 3 years.

But there is more than 1 way to skin the unemployment rate cat:

The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent in July. But that was only because more people gave up looking for jobs. People who are out of work are counted as unemployed only if they're looking for a job.

In addition to those who've given up looking for work, many young Americans are avoiding the job market by remaining in school. All told, the proportion of the adult population that's either working or looking for work fell to 63.5 percent.

That's the lowest level in 31 years for the so-called labor force participation rate. The rate peaked at 67.3 percent in early 2000.

And the people with jobs are getting paid less:

Average hourly wages dipped a penny in August to $23.52 and are only slightly ahead of inflation in the past year.

US economy adds 96K jobs, rate falls to 8.1 pct. - Yahoo! Finance

[jeffkrol]

Ask the "job creators" and banks.. Even Romney said "big business is doing fine"..............................

no it is not regulations.. smoke and mirrors

Based on MMT, MMR and a host of Keynsian types this is all predictable........... We need more Fed stimulus in the RIGHT place this time...........

Pretty well sums it up:

Everybody wants a culprit for bad news, but remember, the news isn't really new. Republicans will continue to blame Obama for failing to create the circumstances necessary for growth. Keynesians will continue to blame Congress for never voting for new fiscal stimulus after February 2009. Others will blame the Federal Reserve for sitting on its hands while the labor market stalls. This jobs report is a Rorschach in which each group will see the conclusions they've already reached. In the meantime, everything is moderately bad and not getting better.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/unemployment-rate-hits-3...eering/262094/

[Nesster]

Mike, what will it take for your company to start adding jobs? Obviously, demand from your clients. And their demand is driven by their internal PL accounting vs. anticipated revenues. This of course depends on your clients' clients... each of which is going through the same calculus at the same time. Any but the privately owned ones must manufacture a quarterly profit and/or exceed analyst estimates in order to maintain their stock prices, and therefore the management's personal wealth (and possibly continued employment).

Given the current ultra low interest environment, something is keeping this chain from starting to expand. This something is not the government controls directly (although anticipated rate of change in regulations and taxation, and anticipated levels of government spending do enter into the future risk calculations).

So if governments are cutting back, corporations are still cutting back or holding, and the consumers are still de-leveraging and looking at their hurt net worth (and stagnant wages), if they are even employed, what exactly will fix this? Surely cutting government spending even more will do this? Or giving greater tax breaks to the million dollar salaried people? While supply side can be the answer to SOME problems, it is not the answer to ALL problems. This time, it seems the problem is on the demand side.

There is a time constant here - the internal PL crunch needs to work its way through corporate accounting just as the debt crunch needs to work its way through personal accounting (I'm talking in aggregate, of course there are individuals and corporations that are exceptions).

Once my internal technology budget constraints ease up, and those of my client businesses, and the overall business decides there is a good chance revenues will pick up next year, then I can call your company to put our a RFC for your services. And then, should your company win the bid, you can start doing tech interviews.

A Keynsian will point out that should Government spend in the form of contracts, my business' clients - or their clients - will get a contract which allows them to further purchase stuff and services... which can stimulate the entire chain. One of the problems this time around is that this is a 'credit bubble' recession, which behaves differently. Corporations and individuals will tend to pay down debt and/or sit on cash, having been burned so recently.

[jeffkrol]

Mike, what will it take for your company to start adding jobs? Obviously, demand from your clients. And their demand is driven by their internal PL accounting vs. anticipated revenues. This of course depends on your clients' clients... each of which is going through the same calculus at the same time. Any but the privately owned ones must manufacture a quarterly profit and/or exceed analyst estimates in order to maintain their stock prices, and therefore the management's personal wealth (and possibly continued employment).

Given the current ultra low interest environment, something is keeping this chain from starting to expand. This something is not the government controls directly (although anticipated rate of change in regulations and taxation, and anticipated levels of government spending do enter into the future risk calculations).

So if governments are cutting back, corporations are still cutting back or holding, and the consumers are still de-leveraging and looking at their hurt net worth (and stagnant wages), if they are even employed, what exactly will fix this? Surely cutting government spending even more will do this? Or giving greater tax breaks to the million dollar salaried people? While supply side can be the answer to SOME problems, it is not the answer to ALL problems. This time, it seems the problem is on the demand side.

There is a time constant here - the internal PL crunch needs to work its way through corporate accounting just as the debt crunch needs to work its way through personal accounting (I'm talking in aggregate, of course there are individuals and corporations that are exceptions).

Once my internal technology budget constraints ease up, and those of my client businesses, and the overall business decides there is a good chance revenues will pick up next year, then I can call your company to put our a RFC for your services. And then, should your company win the bid, you can start doing tech interviews.

That is the most dry "OH SNAP" I ever read.... My hat goes off to you...

addendum w choice tid bits:
http://economywatch.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/07/13728411-weak-jobs-growth-b...ottomline&lite

But a closer look at the data undercuts that argument. The jobless rate fell last month largely because so many people gave up looking for work, went back to school, retired or otherwise left the workforce. Their departure shrank the official count of the labor pool to the lowest portion of the total population in more than 30 years.

As a side note I had argued that our gov. crazy eyes pumping a decrease in the unemployment rate while not recognizing the above was ingenious at best. I'm sure that same REp. gov will use this to his advantage NOW.. at

Though new hiring has been crawling along at a snail’s pace, companies are still managing to squeeze more work out of their existing staffs. Corporate profits are rising, in part, because that weak job market has all but halted wage growth since the 2007 recession ended. Average hourly earnings, along with the number of hours worked, were flat again in August, according to Friday’s data.

The most immediate concern is a disastrous combination of year-end tax increases and spending cuts known as the “fiscal cliff.” Unless defused, the package approved last summer will almost certainly plunge the economy back into a nasty recession.

But no matter who wins the election, it’s far from clear that either party will be able to resolve the budget impasse.

“The lame-duck Congress will punt the "fiscal cliff" problem down the road, postponing the tax hikes and spending cuts for a few months,” said IHS Global Insight chief U.S. economist Nigel Gault. “That means that extreme uncertainty over fiscal policy is likely to remain a fact of life — and a deterrent to risk-taking — well into 2013.” (note:and congress has no skin in this game huh)

That uncertainty – and reluctance to hire – will be stoked by a series of other forces holding back the four-year-old recovery:

While subpar economic growth feels like a recession to many Americans, Europeans are coping with the real thing. The economic contraction that began in troubled economies of Greece and Spain is now spreading to Germany, the flywheel of Europe’s economy, the largest in the world. China, along with the developing economies that feed its massive manufacturing machine, is in an economic slowdown that Beijing has so far been unable to reverse.
The budget impasse in the U.S. is due largely to huge, and rising, cost of providing health care and retirement income to an aging population. The dearth of private retirement savings will bring a slowdown in consumer spending as baby boomers continue to tighten their belts. Those trends are irreversible.
With wage growth stagnant, growth in spending remains weak for consumers in every age group. The boom in borrowing during the 2000s helped offset sluggish wage growth. The resulting housing bust destroyed trillions of dollars in household wealth. Though the housing market is beginning to recover, it will take at least a decade for prices to recover to the 2006 peak.
As private employers have slowed the pace of new hires, state and local governments are still shedding workers. The Obama administration’s massive federal stimulus program – now criticized by Republicans for failing to produce the number of jobs originally projected – helped blunt those layoffs. As those funds have dried up, local governments have been hit with lower sales and property tax receipts, cuts in state aid and, in some cases, mandated tax caps.

, most economists see diminishing returns from another effort to stimulate growth by pumping more money into the system.

ERR... NO!!!!!!!! only the incorrect ones...

---

Last edited by jeffkrol; 09-07-2012 at 10:56 AM.

[JohnInIndy]

Great news on the job front!!!! Yippeeee

The government reported that 96,000 jobs were created in the U.S. last month, fewer than economists had forecast. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent, but only because more people gave up looking for work.
Tech bellwether Intel dealt the market a blow by cutting its revenue outlook because of weak demand for its semiconductors. Intel fell 84 cents, or 3 percent, to $24.25.

[Nesster]

Clearly, corporations are not offering enough incentive for the unemployed to keep searching for a job. Therefore the unemployed are giving up.
Because corporations are not giving incentives for workers to find work, the same workers - and companies - are not buying semiconductors. Because Intel fell 3% several mega-millionaires are now going to cut back on spending, leaving even more people jobless.

[Na Horuk]

You want Obama to give you a job? Then you'd just say its communism and he is taking your freedom

[downhill]

MikeMike... where are they? Seems to me you should be asking the tea baggers in congress and honestly, congress itself who have been nothing but obstructionist to anything related to job creation.

[Nesster]

The only thing this article leaves out is the accusation of "Failure of Leadership" on Obama's part when faced with Republican obstruction:

The American Jobs Act -- One Year Later - The Maddow Blog

On September 8, 2011 -- exactly one year ago tomorrow -- President Obama delivered an important speech to a joint session of Congress. In it, the president unveiled a proposal he called the American Jobs Act.

You may recall the economic circumstances at the time, and how similar they are to 2012 -- though job growth looked strong in the early months of the year, the summer proved disappointing. Obama sought to shift the national conversation away from austerity and towards job creation, and presented a sensible plan, filled with ideas that have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support.

Independent analysis projected the American Jobs Act, which was fully paid for, could create as many as 2 million jobs in 2012.

I mention this now because what happened a year ago is incredibly relevant to what's happening now. This morning's jobs report was disappointing, and we know exactly how the political world will digest the news -- if the job market is underperforming, it's Obama who'll get the blame.

There's not much I can do to change the course of that conversation, but if we're going to play the blame game, we should at least try to keep some semblance of reality in mind.

The American electorate was clamoring for action on jobs; the Obama White House crafted a credible plan that would be helping enormously right now; and congressional Republicans reflexively killed the Americans Jobs Act for partisan and ideological reasons.

With this recent history in mind, how are we to assign responsibility for high unemployment? Should we condemn the person who threw the job market a life preserver, or those who pushed it away? Or put another way, are we better off now as a result of Republican obstructionism and intransigence, or would we have been better off if the popular and effective job-creation measures had been approved?

By any reasonable measure, the GOP argument, which will be trumpeted loudly today, is completely incoherent -- they were wrong a year ago and now we're paying the price.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As we talked about in June, for Republicans, when there's discouraging economic news, Obama deserves all the blame. When there's good economic news, Obama deserves none of the credit. Job losses in 2009 were Obama's fault; job gains in 2010 and 2011 have nothing do to with Obama; and tepid growth in the spring and summer of 2012 are back to being Obama's fault again.

Remember learning the "heads I win, tails you lose" game as a kid? It's the GOP's argument in a nutshell -- whether the president deserves credit or blame for a monthly jobs report is due entirely to whether the report is encouraging or not.

But even this doesn't go far enough in explaining the absurdity on display. If we're going to assign blame to Washington policymakers for the state of the nation's job market, how is it, exactly, that Congress bears no responsibility at all? This is, after all, a Republican-led Congress that has plenty of time to fight a culture war -- I've lost count of the anti-abortion bills that have reached the House floor -- but has shown passive disinterest to the jobs crisis.

Follow this pattern of events:

1. With the job market struggling, Obama unveils the American Jobs Act, a State of the Union agenda filled with economic measures, and an economic "to-do list."

2. Republican lawmakers ignore the proposals, and the job market deteriorates.

3. The GOP then blames Obama for the failure his policies, which Congress didn't pass.

The accepted truth this morning is that weak job numbers are absolute, concrete, incontrovertible proof that the president's jobs agenda isn't working. News flash: we aren't trying Obama's jobs agenda.

[jeffkrol]

The only thing this article leaves out is the accusation of "Failure of Leadership" on Obama's part when faced with Republican obstruction:

The American Jobs Act -- One Year Later - The Maddow Blog

One thing that always struck me is Obama seems to always take the "your adults you work it out" approach.. as is really THE CONSTITUTIONAL approach to a president..
and they try to hang it on him.........

It may be part of the presidents job to direct but it is not his job to HERD all the cats..............

Funny how all the rhetoric on "self sufficiency" when all they want is a "big dog" to bark orders........

[Just1MoreDave]

Where are they Mr. President?


The US would need to be adding 300K/month if we wanted to get down to 6% unemployment by putting people back to work in 3 years.

With every disappointing jobs number, the mass media reports the same thing. Then they interview an R (Obama's fault) and a D (Congress's fault) and on to a Kardashian story. I see a few more pieces to the puzzle:

Government jobs are jobs too, but state and local government jobs have been cut severly. All those R slogans about cutting waste, red tape and ineffiency translate into real job numbers, justified or not.

Job growth is not fast but it is the same as it was in the Bush administration, when any two guys with a pickup were house builders and hiring. Job growth looks a lot like housing too - extremely rare that prices/jobs have returned to historic levels but way better than the bottom. The domestic job decline has to be hugely related to the still-troubled housing market.

A business that is unrelated to housing probably is related to exports. Are there any other economies in the world in great shape? Even China slowed down, OK from like 14% to 8% but still. Europe is mostly terrible, with countries like Spain at 25% unemployment and everyone rethinking the euro concept. So exporting companies aren't going to be hiring either, until Obama or Congress fixes Europe (a joke).

But what do I know, I'm not a highly paid TV commentator.

[jeffkrol]

But what do I know, I'm not a highly paid TV commentator.

fun w/ China..........

China is increasingly becoming a source of final consumer demand for the world economy, but its imports of consumer goods continue to grow at a slower pace than its
imports of machinery and equipment. In part, the import of capital goods is tied to investment in export sectors. But if structural reforms to strengthen the social safety net, boost wages,
and improve access to low-income housing (as outlined in the 12th Five Year Plan) successfully catalyze Chinese consumer spending, then this capacity could increasingly be deployed
domestically and the economy would achieve the handoff from investment- to consumptionled growth. However, a rebalancing of this kind need not entail a large increase in consumer
goods imports (discussed in more detail in Section B of this chapter).

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/reo/2012/APD/eng/c4_0412.pdf

[kswier]

The domestic job decline has to be hugely related to the still-troubled housing market.

That is an interesting thought. Unfortunately, I find it unlikely that the housing market will come back any time soon (at least not to the state it used to be). Baby boomers will be/are retiring and be looking to downsize. Those just graduating from college are often saddled with student loans and many are working jobs that do not pay enough to enable home ownership. I don't think everybody has to own their own home, but I do think the building industry will be depressed for an extended period of time.

[jogiba]

Even with almost 13 million Americans looking for work and 8 million more settling for part-time jobs, almost half the 1,361 U.S. employers surveyed in January by ManpowerGroup say they can’t find workers to fill positions. At the same time, American employers are less likely than their counterparts overseas to invest in training, the Milwaukee-based staffing company reported last month.

Companies have reported more than 3 million job openings every month since February 2011, according to the Department of Labor.

Companies Say 3 Million Unfilled Positions in Skill Crisis: Jobs - Bloomberg

The brain dead Republican base thinks voting for Romney who wants to give the top 1% a huge tax cut will fix that.

[jogiba]

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has reportedly donated $10 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, as he hinted he would after a recent Las Vegas meeting with the GOP candidate.

Adelson’s $10 million check is by far the biggest gift to date to Restore Our Future, a group that’s attracted five new billionaire donors in as many weeks.

Sheldon Adelson Tops Romney Donor List That Now Includes 32 Billionaires - Forbes



Bend over, Sheldon will give you your job.

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