Listen, unless Congress is prepared to make the Census a continuous thing (rather than a once every 10 years thing,) we’re still stuck in a bit of a spot here in the land of Coca-Cola, no matter the President says the economy’s “getting better by the day.”
I don’t know how else to say: this was a very bad, damaging jobs report. We are almost a year away from the point most people consider the end of the recession, last July, and if you buy the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the private sector created 41,000 jobs in May. Sure, the unemployment rate fell, but that has more to do with people dropping out of the labor force rather than finding jobs, which also incidentally is not a good sign (and of course, those people once up a time were counted as part of the labor force rather than conveniently excluded these days.)
My colleague and co-host on the Markets Hub, Madeleine Lim, opined earlier this week that we are starting to see what the economy looks like without all that government stimulus.
The economy added 430,000 jobs in May. The Census Bureau added 411,000. The private sector added 41,000 (the public sector actually lost 20,000 jobs as states are being forced into a Grecian-style austerity mode.) With 15 million people out of work, and nearly half of them out of work for more than six months, you have to have some seriously rose-tinted glasses to interpret that as a sign of strength.
- Deflationary winds kicking up? Core CPI slips into negative territory for first time since 1982. “It’s hard to overlook the fat that negative monthly readings for this data series are extraordinary rare,” James Picerno says. “For the sake of economic stability, let’s hope it stays that way.”
- With Goldman Sachs’ (GS) image under attack, spokesman Lucas van Praag’s tough talk has only served to “alienate potential allies and enablers in the press and project a supercilious institutional arrogance which only serves to confirm the unflattering portrayals offered up by the firm’s detractors,” the Epicurean Dealmaker blog says.
- “High volatility in sentiment is a clear sign of utter confusion on the part of market participants and creates a landscape that is ripe for dramatic moves in either direction,” the Pragmatic Capitalist writes.
- Fed’s discount rate hike has more to do with technical reasons than a policy shift, former Dallas Fed president Bob McTeer says.
- Barclays scooped up a lot of talent throughout the financial crisis, according to LinkedIn data.
- Matt Taibbi’s latest account of the financial crisis misses one key point that no one wants to talk about: we could be in a depression without government intervention, Andrew Leonard writes. Still, reflecting on current bank profits, banks’ resistance to regulation and inability of government to do anything about it, “I’m beginning to come around to the view that maybe it would have been more effective to just blow everything up and start all over.”
- Deal activity has gotten off to a sluggish start in 2010, but investment bankers remain busy keeping up with secondary offerings, DealBook reports.
- Bottom line to this economy recovery is job growth. “The good news is Washington is working on it,” S&P’s Howard Silverblatt says. “The bad news is Washington is working on it.”
- Record bank profits may be tough to come by as the Fed starts raising rates.
- Tiger made the world stop from 11:00 to 11:15 this morning. How’d he do? Bill Simmons says the press conference was “a borderline train wreck.”
J.P. Morgan reported some strong earnings today. But what this bloggers eye were some of the sub-numbers in the earnings report. The bank booked $1.8 billion in investment banking fees. But don’t be fooled – that wasn’t from big M&A advising. But $429 million was in advisory fees. Instead, that $1.3 billion + remaining fees […]
President Reagan’s former budget director David Stockman says Edward Snowden performed a heroic act, the Patriot Act should be repealed, and this whole spying-on-U.S.-citizens thing is a symptom of an out-of-control military-industrial complex. Click here to watch him go on YahooFinance. The author of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in A […]
