Happy Days Are Here Again, Unemployment Down To 9%

All the old paintings on the tombs
They do the sand dance don't you know
If they move too quick (oh whey oh)
They're falling down like a domino

All the bazaar men by the Nile
They got the money on a bet
Gold crocodiles (oh whey oh)
They snap their teeth on your cigarette

Foreign types with the hookah pipes say
Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh
Walk like an Egyptian
Walk like an Egyptian

And all these years I thought they were doing the 'sun' dance. Thanks for setting the record straight, mj.

the number is highly suspect--non farm payrolls/private payrolls gained a lousy 36k/50k jobs, while both were expected to gain 150k--the rate is all about arbitrary reduction in size of workforce---attributed to the storms--seems nuts to me that people withdraw from the workforce based on snowstorms

RealestateNY, not yet, but getting there fast! :) I'm a happy guy!

"the pace of the jobs recovery is not only not in line with past "recoveries" it's not even at the pace it was a few months ago."

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-percent-job-losses-in-post-wwii-recessions-2011-2

Have a nice day.

sure is inline wit past recoveries pulaski. The only time uneployment dropped 40 bps from one month to the next was in 1983. Right before the 20 yr bull run. Isn't that great news! Have a great day!

FSteve... in my family, day dreaming is not a financial strategy. Good luck with you condos... and say hi to the douche who kept pumping RE, until he sold... what was that dude's name again?

Oh spunkster, you're such a silly billy: the unemployment rate fell because more people gave up looking for jobs.

Still very tough times everywhere. Jobs are lagging seriously. Real estate is also very very slow and doesn't look like its improving. Only at the extreme top are they partying.

Is it too soon to break up the party???

Why The Unemployment Rate Fell For 'All The Wrong Reasons'

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Submit this storydigg reddit stumble After a month of positive signs indicating a strengthening American economy, the news from Friday's Bureau of Labor statistics report paints a disappointing -- and confusing -- picture.

Although the unemployment rate fell to from 9.4 to 9 percent in January, a scant 36,000 jobs were added to payrolls. The word many economists are using Friday morning to describe this discrepancy is simply "confounding."

"We don't believe the extent of the drop in the unemployment rate," said Stuart Hoffman, an economist at PNC. "It's like funhouse mirror image, although I don't know if there's anything funny about it. The unemployment rate appears to be falling much stronger than it actually is, while payroll job growth is probably stronger than it actually is -- but certainly not strong enough to suggest that drop in the unemployment rate."

One reason for January's sharp drop in unemployment is that more workers than ever have grown so discouraged that they have simply stopped looking for work. If an unemployed American stops searching for work, they are no longer counted as officially unemployed. Indeed, the pool of workers who have given up the hunt has reached a stunning new low for this recession: nearly 5 million have dropped out of the labor force completely.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/unemployment-rate-falls-t_2_n_818727.html

SO there you have it: the unemployment rate fell entitely becuase peopel gave up looking, not because jobs were created.

David Stockman, former head of OMB under Reagan just said on CNBC that the reason the rate dropped was because since last month, a half million jobs were wiped off the total jobs number -- they just disappeared. Combined with the people who stopped looking, the rate should be a high 9.9% -- rounding error of 10% unemployment. He said the manipulation of numbers was appalling.

He also warned of a bond conflagration when QE2 ends. We have 40 billion GDP growth and we are selling 120B in bonds -- 3X GDP. When the govt stops buying there will be no one to buy the bonds. It will not end well.

ANd here's the latest press release from Boehner & Co. about the unempliyment rate:

The drop in the unemployment rate last month wasn't enough, Republicans said Friday in reaction to the latest jobless numbers.

The GOP used the report showing that the unemployment rate had dropped to nine percent as a pretext for calling for new spending cuts, and attack President Obama's stimulus policies.

"Instead of more ‘stimulus’ spending and more debt, as the president proposed in his State of the Union address, we need less spending, more freedom, and more certainty for those in America who create jobs," House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

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Oops, I guess nobody told the dimwits that the only reason the number dropped was because peopel left the workforce. And they want to take credit for that? They should be hiding.

so since the job report is so totally wrong and things have actually gotten worse, shouldnt the treasury market be rallying because we're gonna need QE3 ? or let me guess...its GS setting thier shorts...riiiiiight

I said the other week job are not coming back for at least 10-15 years. I think I need to change that forecast to 15-20 years.

there is no political will for QE3

yeah but if this report were such bs and things were getting worse, treasuries would be rallying like crazy especially since the pummeling theyve taken recently.

Your looking too hard at the numbers.
Unemployment percentages are a joke. You're 100% employed, you're 100% unemployed, you're PT.
The job story has changed for many years. 8-9% (true %) will become the norm as a new class of unskilled (via atrophy of skill sets) unemployable persons take shape as a group. Not such a big deal. Look at Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia....all high levels of unskilled unemployed...no problem.

The idea of 4-5% unemployed...this was brief. The trick now is to find a skill set for your child so that their life's endeavor does not disappear without warning.
Spoke with an audio engineer who is being replace by a computer system.
Spoke with a radiologist who told me that reading x-rays and the such is being outsource to India.
I'm trying to convince my kid to go into waste removal...here I see a future.

I can't wait for the riots of unemployed people in the streets. That will be fun. It will come eventually. Only question is when. If someone has been with no job for 7 years and lost everything, what do they have to lose?

high levels of unskilled employment will trickle up and also create high levels of skilled unemployment. We're seeing it now.

What's worse is what's about the happen to the stock market, puffed up as it is by free Fed money - a horrible, horrible monetarist monetary policy: on a day like today we should have seen the stock market fall 1% to 2%; instead it remains effectively unchanged.

Add to that riots in the Middle East, which should also cause the market to fall, and you will see: when this crashes - as it must - it will be fast and furious. Commodity prices cannot continue to rise like this; gold cannot rise at the same time as stocks. It's all a horrendous bubble like the dot.com bubble, when I kept on asking myself about this "New Economy" concept: this is fake. The economy can't actually recover until people are employed. The unemployment rate may be falling, but when 50,000 jobs are created a month, and 300,000 are needed just to keep up with the population growth, and China and emerging markets are importing our inflation, this has to end badly.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't see any other way. What is happening violates every accepted precept of economics and finance developed empirically over the past 75 years.

or...hmmmmmm...are assets behaving as if we are in an inflationary environment ? commodities up, bonds down, stocks up.....

>What's worse is what's about the happen to the stock market, puffed up as it is by free Fed money - a horrible, horrible monetarist monetary policy: on a day like today we should have seen the stock market fall 1% to 2%; instead it remains effectively unchanged.

What is about to happen to the stock market? If you expected today to be down 1-2%, how can you be so sure about your projections for the future performance?

I'm with Stevehjx. Mkt is dysfucked.

No, assets aren't behaving as if we were in an inflationary environment, because wages would rise at the same time and there is no evidence of that.

the tell to me that things are screwed are the pundits. Take for example Marc Faber and George Soros. On paper, the only thing that these two should ever be able to agree on is that pork might be bad for your diet. Yet they are both in gold. For apocalyptic reasons. They both think the printing of endless money will end badly. In fact, we should start a thread of who thinks This Will End Badly. Today was the first time I heard a responsible human use the term Conflagration. (David Stockman). Scary, really.

I wonder if people who are always negative have more bad things happen to them than normal people. Maybe they deserve it. Maybe they seek it out.

This is even scarier:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41426974

It's not inflation because inflation is a permanent phenomenon; that is, prices don't recede to their former level because that would entail deflation, and wages are too sticky for that. What it is is a bubble. Bad cause and effect: just because in normal times stock prices rise with employment does NOT mean that causing stock prices to rise artificially will increase employment.

This is Milton Friedman economics and it is foolhardy, a true pyramid scheme, the worst kind, one that can deflate very quickly.

I discussed the Flash Crash with a retired trader; he says he doesn't think it was a mistake or accident at all, but rather a result of the end of the Fed's QE1: one person pulled out enough money that caused automated trading programs to sell, and sell faster than market makers could buy.

I think he's right. I think the Fed has basically told market makers to buy stocks with the free money; it must be, because volumes are extremely low: Dow volume right now, at 3.45 pm, is 93 million shares. There is no retail activity; retail, investors, have pulled out of the stock market, net, in the last year.

This will be very ugly.

scary what a little knowledge about how markets work can do. all about the conspiracy huh...look up what the fund flows were into equity funds were the last few months. that aint the fed. I will give you the idea that once the retail guy starts getting in, then its time to get out.

Read this:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41408510

>I discussed the Flash Crash with a retired trader; he says he doesn't think it was a mistake or accident at all, but rather a result of the end of the Fed's QE1: one person pulled out enough money that caused automated trading programs to sell, and sell faster than market makers could buy.

Ooh, retired trader, sounds expert.

commodity markets already have circuit breakers in place. commodity markets are probobly the best regulated markets when it comes to order flow anyways.

"US Needs To Generate 246,600 Jobs A Month To Get To Pre-Depression Employment By End Of Obama Second Term"

"246,600. That is how many jobs the US has to generate every single month until November 2016, or the end of Obama's improbable second turn, for the unemployment rate to get back to where it was when accounting for population growth."

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/us-needs-generate-246600-jobs-month-get-pre-depression-employment-end-obama-second-term

Good luck with that, have a great weekend and enjoy the Super Bowl.

That only proves what a huge hole the double Bush Administrations put us in.

The roots of all of this go further back than George II, I think, perhaps as far back as Nixon & wage & price controls: what a success they were! Volcker did half the job, squeezing inflation out of the economy, but the other half is fiscal, not monetary, though these monetary policies are exacerbating the fiscal policies. We've gotten ourselves to the place that we need to balance the checkbook, but balancing the checkbook is precisely what we can't do, or it will cause another depression, making the first one look like a holiday at the beach.

Unfortunately, the Republicans are selling the same old snake oil, and the Democrats have no backbone. Can't decide who's worse.

democrats because they know better but don't want to sacrifice themselves.

>democrats because they know better but don't want to sacrifice themselves.

Always finding someone to blame. Who should we blame next columbiacounty? Who isn't worthy of your blame?

"Isn't that great news! Have a great day!"

yeah, too bad SteveF has been in real estate, not stocks...

"I'm sick of stocks, it's time for real estate investing"
http://streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/5719-im-sick-of-stocks-its-time-for-real-estate-investing?last_page=true