If you are one of many people who believe we are somehow reaching a bottom to this ‘recession’ because of the recent release of April unemployment data – you need to take a closer look. Chris Martenson has – once again – dissected the actual data and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that our government and the media continue to ‘spin’ the data to make it look much more positive.
From the article in Chris’ post below:
“April's loss of 539,000 jobs was the smallest decline since October's 380,000”
539,000 is a very big number – but is it an accurate indication of what is really happening? No. If we remove the ridiculous birth/death adjustment (+226,000 jobs out of thin air) – we see that our economy actually lost 765,000 jobs in April – far worse than reported – and we see that the trend continues to show that our economy is deteriorating. Nothing within the actual economic data I see suggests a ‘turnaround’.
I recommend that you watch Chris’ video below if you want a better understanding of how our government manipulates economic data. Not surprisingly, their recent manipulations tend to lead to more positive results.
jg – May 11, 2009
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From ChrisMartenson.com:
Thank you, Erik (and others!), for the support and the idea to publicize. I think I will send out a short message and link to it by newsletter AND do a blog post.
Meanwhile, I am finding myself quite amused by the payroll numbers released this morning at 8:30:
Payrolls drop by 539,000; jobless rate jumps to 8.9%
By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch
Last update: 8:36 a.m. EDT May 8, 2009
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The U.S. economy continued to shred jobs at a horrendous pace in April, with nonfarm payrolls falling by 539,000 and the unemployment rate jumping to a 26-year high of 8.9%, the Department of Labor reported Friday.
The report was largely as expected, reflecting an easing in the pace of massive job destruction from the previous five months. Since the recession began in December 2007, payrolls have fallen by 5.7 million, or 4.1% of payrolls, the largest percentage decline since the 1958 recession.
April's loss of 539,000 jobs was the smallest decline since October's 380,000. Job losses in February and March were revised higher by 66,000.
The article goes on in great depth to parse out the numbers, but mysteriously makes no mention of the the birth-death model, the most important number of them all.
Here it is:
Here it is:
[see table at top of blog post]
Wow! The government's model managed to crank out 226,000 additional "thin-air" jobs to add back into the mix. For the record, this is 50,000 MORE jobs than were added by the model last April.
Wow! The government's model managed to crank out 226,000 additional "thin-air" jobs to add back into the mix. For the record, this is 50,000 MORE jobs than were added by the model last April.
What sort of a model do they have that assesses the current hiring conditions to be 30% better than last year? What model could possibly be adding construction and finance jobs at this time? What do they use for inputs? How come these modelers still have jobs?
At any rate, if the B-D model had not added the 226,000 jobs, the report would have come in at -765,000, which is FAR worse than expected.
Really, this is just getting silly at this point. The US government is losing all credibility at a quite rapid pace, and more and more people are catching on. But in all seriousness, I fear the backlash that could result from the populace when the collective weight of all these insults to our intelligence finally boil over into some sort of a response.
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