New unemployment numbers are out. Isn’t it great when the first Friday of the month is so early? So what’s the general feeling you should have about this report? – “Meh. It’s OK, but just OK.” Here are the basic numbers.
Official Rate: 8.8 percent
Total Jobs created: 216,000
U6 (underemployment rate): 15.6 percent
Gallup Unemployment: 10.4 (down from 10.6)
Gallup Underemployment 20.3 (up from 19.8)
If you’ve been paying attention to these sorts of reports, you should find that this one looks a bit better than the last one. I’m still studying the numbers but that seems to be a fair assessment. There isn’t any drop off in the workforce participation rate as there was last month which artificially dropped the unemployment numbers down to 8.9.
The unemployment rate hasn’t risen either, which believe it or not can be a good thing in the short term. It would indicate people are thinking the job market has improved and want to get back in. This is usually the sign that the unemployment numbers are about to rise temporarily. If that were to happen, it would be normal in a recession and could be a sign that people feel things are turning around, but that isn’t happening. Things are still fairly stagnant.
Underemployment rose slightly because Gallup polled people who said they wanted to work full time instead of their current part time positions. As Gallup put it: “The underemployed in March became neither more nor less hopeful about finding work soon.”
Personally, although I cannot quantify this, I feel that any benefits we’ll see in unemployment at this point is probably stimulus related to the Federal Reserve, and as such is artificial, shallow and temporary.
More disturbing is this report from Stephen Moore (conservative economist) a shill who’s face you will immediately recognize, today says “there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.”
For more, read these reports.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2…00-jobs-88.html
http://www.gallup.com/poll/127091/u…ises-march.aspx
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-…an-krueger.html – Particularly good. Why is unemployment falling so fast?
