patrick.net

Now California officially has 12.2 percent unemployment and none of the state and local city workers
have even been laid off yet even though the drastic cutbacks have been predicted for months.
This has got to reduce all consumer spending for a long time to come and eventually will drag down all
housing prices just because very few will be able to qualify for a mortgage.
Even investors will have problems because they have been buying rental properties in areas with
rapidly increasing unemployment and no prospect of new jobs in the foreseeable future.
Who will want to rent there?

And don't anybody get the wise idea of working for less than enough to make a living. In CA, don't do sh## for less than 120K a year.

Yes I agree jobless rate is higher.

You can better follow total over all unemployment using the U-6 numbers, currently marked at 16%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bureau_of_Labor_Statistics

United States Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures employment and unemployment (of those over 15 years of age) using two different labor force surveys[32] conducted by the United States Census Bureau (within the United States Department of Commerce) and/or the Bureau of Labor Statistics (within the United States Department of Labor) that gather employment statistics monthly. The Current Population Survey (CPS), or "Household Survey", conducts a survey based on a sample of 60,000 households. This Survey measures the unemployment rate based on the ILO definition.[33] The data are also used to calculate 5 alternate measures of unemployment as a percentage of the labor force based on different definitions noted as U1 through U6:[34]

U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.
U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.
U3: Official unemployment rate per ILO definition.
U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.
U5: U4 + other "marginally attached workers", or "loosely attached workers", or those who "would like" and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.
U6: U5 + Part time workers who want to work full time, but cannot due to economic reasons.

I just want to say:
If you don't need people to work, don't give them sh## for being unemployed.
I don't see any new wave of hiring... No green jobs, no nothing...
so just send us a weekly check to buy our basic necessities.
Unless you want to pay me big bucks for my skills, shouldn't I just chill out and wait?
Like ferr sherr, right?
And unemployment is going to go like 120% from what I've heard... just some in the know sources I keep confidential.

The September unemployment number is now up to 9.8 percent and U6 up to 17 percent.
No sign of any new jobs created by the "stimulus" package. In fact governement layoffs have increased.
The fact that 500,000 more workers have stopped looking for work shows that there is no real prospect of
even part-time employment on the horizon and no real world "recovery" at all.
GM recently hired back 1400 workers but is now going to close down Saturn that will put 13,000 people out of work so the
"improvement" in the auto industry didn't last long.

Today the weekly new unemployment claims have "leveled off" at a mere 505,000.
They fail to report that the emergency extended claims recipients have increased to about
4,000,000 and these extension programs all end on January 1, 2010 unless congress
votes to change the end date, which it strangely did not do when it supposedly "extended"
the benefits for 20 more weeks.
It is looking like a lot of stuff will be hitting the fan in first weeks of 2010.

If the government wants to maintain civil control, it will extend unemployment benefits. Nothing creates angry mobs that want blood like millions of unwashed, unhoused, and hungry people.

It's interesting that the government keeps claiming it can't keep accurate records of the
650,000 jobs supposedly created or saved by the "stimulus package" but we are to believe that
the weekly and monthly statistics on 100 million or so workers throughout the country are miraculously correct.
We already have millions of homeless and unemployed people and the food banks are runniing out
of supplies all over the country yet nobody seems to be creating any angry mobs yet.
Also millions are not even getting unemployment so they can be expected to make some noise eventually.

Shadowstats chart is scary stuff:

Vicente says

Shadowstats chart is scary stuff:

Indeed. most of the time sgs is close to practical, that means atleast 20% unemployed and the rate at which its increasing is alarming.

Well today we have a surprise "drop" in unemployment from 10.2 percent to an even 10 percent.
But the reporting does not mention that almost 300,000 people were extracted from the "civilian workforce" numbers which automatically reduces the percentage of unemployed by about .2 percent even with no new jobs.
I also notice that the average work week is still only 33.2 hours so we have a long way to go before most employers will need more full time workers.
In fact the number of part time and temporary workers is continuing to increase so there is still resistance to hiring full time.

Here in California we don't get the current state unemployment numbers until December 18.
Since I am only interested in buying property here I think those numbers will be mroe sigificant
that the national numbers wheich are much lower.
As far as the idea that employers are "about to start hiring" I notice that I and my co-workers who have taken significant pay cuts have not yet gotten back any of that reduction and have been told we won't for the foreseeable future. So how can employers go out and start hiring more people until they restore full pay and hours to their current full time employees???

Also notice the spike in unemployed that fell off the state unemployment and into the federal extension and no longer being counted. Not much coverage on this.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/untold-story-emergency-unemployment-compensation-surge-265k-one-week

So last week we were told that only 11,000 jobs had been lost in all of November.
Now this week we have an increase of 17,000 applications for unemployment in a single week.
Total applications are still close to 500,000 per week but only 2750 jobs are being lost per week?
Those numbers make no sense at all.
Last month ADP said that 169,000 jobs had been lost not 11,000.
ADP does payroll for 600,000 businesses and has real data to work with.
The BLS just does a "survey" without having actual payroll records and only surveys about 150,000
businesses, far less than the number in the ADP database.
I would think anyone who values factual data would put miore faith in the ADP numbers than in the
BLS numbers.

pinnacle says

I would think anyone who values factual data would put miore faith in the ADP numbers than in the
BLS numbers

Amen! May be we should hire more people to BLS. Speaking of that,

http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/6581475/

census job creation: 1.5 mil

Now Obama will take credit for 1.5 million short term jobs as if he "created them" even though they would have been hired anyway.
I guess that's why they stalled on spending the stimulus money so they could get a bump up in jobs for the election year, all of which will go away after the census.

pinnacle says

Now Obama will take credit for 1.5 million short term jobs as if he “created them” even though they would have been hired anyway.

I guess that’s why they stalled on spending the stimulus money so they could get a bump up in jobs for the election year, all of which will go away after the census.

May be that's why he is skipping lunch with King, concerts and conferences in Norway so that he can rush home and take credit for those jobs because he doesn't deserve that prize after deciding to send more troops to Afghanistan. Wait until he can't fulfil his Iraq troop withdrawal promise. I feel for the families and our troops.

In addition to the still bad unemployment numbers I notice that the treasury finally admitted that the "foreclosure prevention program" has only resulted in 31,000 permanent mortgage modifications out of 700,000 trial modifications.
Not much help for a 75 billion dollar program. Thats about 2,350,000 dollars for each permanent modification.

Today's numbers show even more applications for unemployment and about 150,000
more being added to the "extended" unemployment programs.
How many years can we extend unemployment before workers become totally unemployable?
We keep hearing about "education and job training" as being critical to our future economy yet we let millions of people sit around doing nothing for years on end and make no effort to provide any
new job skills and expect these people to be hired by employers who will be in a position to pick and choose only the most highly skilled and experienced workers.
A friend of mine has been out of work for two years and in that time I have been required to learn
several new types of software and work with multiple new digital systems.
Who is an employer going to hire, the guy who has been working been working with the latest techonology or the guy who has been sidelined on long term unemployment doing nothing for two years?

permanent_marker says

All I know is, stock market, which surged ahead based on some inflated earnings, now coming to face with,

- unemployment numbers

- low consumer confidence
(aka the ‘real’ economy indicators)

That's called a bubble my friend. :)

Today the California unemployment numbers for November finally came out.
They say we have a "decrease" to "only" 12.3 percent unemployment statewide.
But this decrease is only possible because 48,000 people have been extracted from the
civilian workforce numbers because they have simply given up looking for jobs altogether.
In reality there was a loss of another 21,000 jobs in California in November even though the
federal unemployment statistics claim a loss only 11,000 jobs in the entire country in November.

There are countless more unemployed that aren't counted.... EDD hasn't even had the decency to call my finance for a phone interview concerning her unemployment. She can't get through to them because the phone lines are jammed up all day... And they don't respond to emails. She's been unemployed for over a month now and she filed in early November.

They are claiming a drop in the unemployment numbers, because they are keeping people in limbo.

It's kind of like the banks who don't list the foreclosed houses as being for sale. We now have a limbo economy on all levels.
Today more good news, officially 85,000 jobs lost when many people were predicting a gain
of 8,000 to 10,000 for December.
Of course the real number of jobs lost in December is 589,000 but don't expect that number to be reported anywhere.

The BLS makes so many bad assumptions that it's not worth the time to try to figure it out. Instead, I think a better use of one's time is to safeguard one's assets from all the govt spending. In my opinion the U.S. dollar is in a lot of trouble in the long run because the Fed is now caught in a position where it cannot withdraw the stimulus or stop the money printing because it would devastate the economy. So one of the few ways for people to protect themselves from this fiat currency debasement is to continue to add to gold positions on pullbacks. And I recently came across an article titled "Canadian Gold Stocks Rally as Gold Price Opens 2010 Higher" at http://www.goldalert.com/ which discusses the outlook for a bunch of gold-related sectors, including several gold mining companies based in Canada that have benefited and should continue to benefit from the bull market in gold.

In the last 3 months we've fired 2 techs and hired two techs. The two techs we fired were making more than $20/hr. The two new hired techs are making less than $15/hr. This isn't the kind of thing that gets reported.

Keep saving money...
Keep saving money...

Wait for it... Wait for it...

Keep saving money...

If the government doesn't stop meddling with the free markets, I'll end up being a landless Millionare.

But one thing for sure, none of the rosy doctored up economic numbers are from one red cent of mine.

knewbetter says

In the last 3 months we’ve fired 2 techs and hired two techs. The two techs we fired were making more than $20/hr. The two new hired techs are making less than $15/hr. This isn’t the kind of thing that gets reported.

No, but when they report that tax reciepts are down it shows up there (and probably no place else).

Of course the average work hours are also stagnant at 33.2 so there is not much need to hire
additional "full time" workers.
Nobody I know of has yet heard that their reduced pay and reduced hours are going to be restored any time soon so that also indicates no sign of this big "recovery" we keep hearing about.
If work hours go down below 30 everyone would be considered part-time and the U6
labor underutilization number would be 100 percent.
Only 3.2 hours a week keeps this from officially being worse than the great depression
yet we still keep getting stupid happy talk about recovery.
Soom we'll get the baloney about how short term census jobs have "jump started" the economy.
Today we also heard that 5 billion dollars will be wasted to train "renewable energy" workers.
The only "renewable energy" jobs in California that I can find are for the trainers who of course will make all kinds of money from government contracts, but almost no existing businesses are offering actual clean energy jobs.
I found just eight solar panel installer jobs in the whole state and one wind generator mechanic job
and a few engineering jobs requiring college degrees not a six week training course.
This is just like how all the "new economy" internet jobs were supposed to make us all rich ten years ago. Back then my idiot congressman David Dreier said selling our old junk on Ebay would pay all our bills better than a real job would.
Look how well that turned out.

zzyzzx says

knewbetter says

In the last 3 months we’ve fired 2 techs and hired two techs. The two techs we fired were making more than $20/hr. The two new hired techs are making less than $15/hr. This isn’t the kind of thing that gets reported.

No, but when they report that tax reciepts are down it shows up there (and probably no place else).

When is this little tidbit going to start showing up in the budget talks? I'd love to see hit before March-April, right about when this recovery is exposed as a joke, and another round of stimulus is debated. Just as Bush's deficits were invariably under-estimated the trillion dollar deficit will soon be a 2 trillion dollar deficit.

Today the White House announces that they will count all pay raises provided with stimulus money as "new jobs" created.
In all fairness then the unemployment numbers should subtract all pay cuts from the
job numbers since millions of people are seeing pay and hours reduced equivalent to several hundred thousand lost jobs.

I guess we should figure that those big Wall Street bonuses count as lots of "new jobs" since the amount of money involved is gigantic and it is all coming from "stimulus money" provided by the White House.
That and a new tax health insurance is just what America needs.
Thanks for supporting the "middle class" Mr. President.

Statistics don't lie ... statisticians do. This reminds me of the Great Depression and the manner in which the Government propagandized the people back then. The stock market of today certainly has parallels to the infamous Sucker's Rally of 1930. After the Crash of 1929, it rallied to recover almost all of the losses of 1929. After it crashed again, it took until 1954 to recover to its 1930 level. Well into 1933, the Depression was still being referred to as a recession and that the economy was "turning around." The New York Times published many bogus accounts such as "Cleveland is optimistic .... Chicago is back to work... etc." ... all pure fiction. ALL administrations use the most optimistic statistics to prove their policies are working, i.e. vote us back in. Whenever I hear anything promulgated by the government, I always reach for the salt shaker.

As I expected today's unemployment applications report shows an increase of 36,000
and not the decrease everyone was predicting.
Also a whopping 656,000 more people are now getting extended federal benefits, not exactly a sign of an improving economy. And these numbers are based on the current distorted system that
grossly understates the real unemployment rate.
When is the government going to get real admit they have no idea how to stop
the loss of jobs?

Today California reported another 39,000 jobs lost. More proof of the "economic recovery".
I wonder where people are getting the money to buy houses at all let alone at the still inflated prices I see all over the place.

This is the dems tradtional way to "improve" the US, pay people not to work and raise taxes on the few that are working!?! Brilliant! Another sign of 2012 LOL!!!

Tonight we get the big speech with more cliams that millions of jobs have been "saved".
Unfortunately saving jobs does not help the millions of people who don't have any jobs in the
first place.
More job tax credits won't help either because taxes are not a big problem for small businesses who don't have enough customers.
If 700 billion had simply been loaned to small businesses we would have a lot more jobs than the stupid stimulus package " saved or created".

Hmm! If small businesses were so important than what was the TARP money going to big bank for? Shouldn't that be loaned to small businesses?

Yesterday we heard how "successful" the stimulus package was by taking a year to supposedly "save or create" 2 million jobs. Nobody mentioned the fact that another 300,000 people have started collecting federal extended unemployment benefits in just the past week.
I got an email from the democratic party with a graph showing how the job losses have decreased
since their wonderful stimulus plan was passed, but it fails to show how many more millions
have been excluded from the workforce numbers because they have given up looking for work altogether. Even if job losses stop altogether none of the millions who have lost jobs in the past year are be rehired so how can that be called a "recovery"?

For thousands of year leaders have known that idle hands breed sedition and unrest and chaos. They don't care if you are digging holes and filling them in on government money, as long as you aren't out rousing the rabble. It's not even a question in my mind if stimulus money was effective or efficient use of money, that is not the core intent.