Good numbers in the June jobs report today: 223K new jobs, unemployment down to 5.3%.
Oh wait I'm sorry THAT'S HORRIBLE NEWS.
The addition of 223,000 jobs followed a 254,000 increase in the prior month that was less than previously estimated, a Labor Department report showed Thursday in Washington. The jobless rate fell to a seven-year low of 5.3 percent as more people left the labor force.
The figures indicate corporate managers are confident they can temper hiring and meet demand against a backdrop of stronger consumer spending and feeble overseas markets. At the same time, more moderate job gains may still be enough to reduce the unemployment rate, consistent with the Federal Reserve’s perceived timetable to raise borrowing costs by year-end.
An increase in June payrolls followed smaller gains in the prior two months and wages were little changed as U.S. job market reflected a more moderate pace of economic growth.
“One month’s low number wouldn’t shake our optimism,” Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said before the report. “The job market still has a ways to go but we’re making progress.”
Again, when we were losing 800K jobs a month under Bush, 223K new jobs and more than five straight YEARS of job growth is "disappointing" and equals "low numbers".
Good news for President Romney though.
You assholes are going to miss Obama when he's gone.
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These Bloomberg guys are paid to supposedly interpret the current market forces, but in most cases they're just guessing, or outright wrong, or spinning their narrative. They are factually right in showing the current snapshot of employment trends through statistics, but in the end, they end up being scolds representing the .001 percent telling us why we can't have nice things. If they told the real truth, they'd be out of a job period. Just stenographers, doing what they're told.
This is an employers market, make no doubts about it, and labor has had very little leverage recently. The recent great recession has brought a tremendous blight upon our economy. Steeped with a decades long race to the bottom, and massive outsourcing, this has led to an inevitable paradigm shift on our society, in how we apply for our jobs.
Case in point: Background checks. Many of the long term unemployed simply can't pass a basic background check. This is one of the major factors that reflects the employment participation rate. Think about it. Employers get to pick and choose who they hire, and now they have more tools to make that pick. What you say on social media is also at their disposal. Age and previous salary, need I say more. My employer can retroactively fire me if I ever am ever convicted of a felony. And because I drive a company vehicle, if I ever get a DUI, that is also grounds for termination. It's the world we live in now, and it's the soup we swim in.
And don't think for a minute that these people will miss Obama. This new economy is purposely structured this way, and the .001 percent love it so. It's a feature, not a bug. And so it goes...
One aspect of business news that has irritated me these four decades is that anything a reasonable man would consider "good news" for the nation is bound to spook Wall Street and make the markets nervous.
Wages up? OMG THAT'S HORRIBLE! And out come the knives to trim another thousand jobs from the work force. This may be rational for the billionaire set, but what really irks me is the cubicle rat who has a couple 100K in his IRA and therefore identifies with the ownership class. I try to convince these guys, my friends basically, that their biggest asset is their earning potential - that anything they might conceivably make on the stock market is sweet but ultimately trivial compared to their salary streams - such that the secular stagnation of compensation since 1970 has cost them more than they realize and thus correcting this problem ought to be their number one political goal.
Quite a hard sell, I have learned, for reasons that I don't comprehend. The only thing that makes sense is that the slow tax of inflation has been invisible to them, and in that context it feels better to be relatively well paid in general low level than reasonably well paid at a high general level.
As an aside, I believe this is why we don't have Social Democracy in America. I have lived the dream in Scandinavia, where they really do have a sense of solidarity that Americans just can not grasp. One consequence is that the ability to claw your individual way to the top really doesn't earn you the sort of admiration that it does here - yet, paradoxically to Americans, the Scandinavians continue to churn out high achievers.
The late, great, George Carlin put it best.
The reason why it's called "The American Dream", is because you have to be asleep to believe it.
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