Closer scrutiny of BLS report reveals the nation lost 109,000 jobs in November.

[girl gone mad]

We’re Not Done With The Jobs Report
http://markettalk.newswires-americas.com/?p=6816#more-6816">Market Talk

Amid all the wailing about sovereign debt downgrades and such, you may have missed yesterday’s jobless numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. No, you didn’t miss the monthly jobs report, or even the weekly initial claims. What you missed (if you did miss it,) was the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Or, the JOLTS report.

The BLS reported there were 2.5 million job openings in October, with the opening rate at 1.9%, a level that has held steady since March. That means hiring has not picked up at any pace since the stock-market rally - and the purported recovery - began, and the ratio of more than six unemployed for every job opening remains steady.

So even if you buy into Friday’s jobs report, the fact remains that hiring has not picked up, which is confirmed by the fact that long-term unemployment continues to rise.

And if you don’t buy into Friday’s report, well, you’re not alone. Like I wrote Friday, I’m skeptical. And certainly Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke didn’t think it was strong enough to get him to even hint that he might lift interest rates off the floor. And other folks are still deconstructing it.

East Shore Partners’ Frank Veneroso, who initially called the November jobs report “super strong,” is rethinking that position today. He was initially impressed by the increase in the work week and the upward revisions to prior months. But “after thinking about this for several days, I realize I may have overstated the implications for recovery strength.”

“My concern today that I was premature in heralding significant employment improvement last Friday is fed by some of the recent concurrent economic data.” He cites several competing reports, the NFIB report, the ISM services report, the JOLTS report, and withholding tax data, which all paint a weaker picture than the BLS report.

“The withholding income tax data does not lie because tax withholding is automatic. The payroll survey lies because the birth/death model contribution is a ‘plug number’ based on a past employment picture that looks nothing like employment in this recession, which is the worst in three generations.”

Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg takes note note of a little known (I’d never heard of it) calculation the BLS does, the “adjusted” household survey, which tries to reconcile the establishment and household surveys. According to that figure, the nation lost 109,000 jobs in November.

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[Goldstein1984]

1. But I thought things were looking up!?!

The stock market is UP.

Unemployment is UP.

Foreclosures are UP.

With all that UP, why am I feeling so DOWN?

[wuvuj]

2. The future of job growth...cyclical vs structural forces ...

http://economistsview.typepad.com/timduy/2009/12/structural-and-cyclical.html

Once the early stages of recovery are complete, the story shifts from cyclical to structural. The boost from inventory correction, pent-up demand, and government stimulus fade, and the underlying growth rate, the fundamental rates of activity, becomes evident. Now your expectations about the nation's economic direction depend on the weight you place on the structural factors. If you place nearly zero weight on those factors, then growth remains fairly high as the economy rapidly returns to potential. In effect, cyclical dynamics dominate your story; the Fed is simply flipping a switch that shifts the economy from high to low states and back again, a traditional post-WWII business cycle. If you place heavy weight on structural stories, you talk about the inability to revert to past patterns of consumer spending growth due to excessive household debt, a reversion to global imbalances that supports outsized import growth, lack of an asset bubble to compensate for these structural problems, etc. With these stories in your toolkit, you expect a low underlying growth rate - barely at potential growth - in which case the gap between actual and potential output remains distressingly high for possibly years to come.

I tend to view incoming data through both cyclical and structural lenses. The employment report is a prime example. Clearly, the steady improvement in the rate of deterioration of nonfarm payrolls since the spring follows the cyclical pattern as firms stop chasing demand down and thus stabilize their workforces. Moreover, recent increases in temporary help hiring also points to firming labor demand in the months ahead. It would seem that stronger growth does in fact have the desired impact on labor markets, and that fiscal stimulus helped accelerate recovery in the labor markets.

At the same time, though, one has to wonder what happens as the stimulus begins to fade? Will there be sufficient demand from other sectors to compensate for fiscal and monetary withdrawal?

Longterm trend is down?

http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e20120a71fb80d970b-800wi

[JohnWxy]

3. News to make Republicans cheer! It's the American people vs the Corporate Lobbyist Party.

Every effort of Obama and the Democrats to heal the nation from this REPUBLICAN DYSTOPIA is being fought and every bit of HOPEFUL news will be shit upon by these AMERICAN TALIBAN - the Republican Party.

Personally, I hope WE THE PEOPLE win. I hope Obama and the Democrats are able to lead us out of this REPUBLICAN DYSTOPIA - the greatest economic disaster this country has seen since the Great Depression (I). But if they do, it won't be because of anything the Corporate Lobbyist party did to help. The American Taliban are fighting Obama and the Democrats every step of the way desperately trying to keep them from succeeding in rebuilding our economy from the enormous damage of the Deregulation Disaster of 2008 and the Housing Bubble created by too easy credit (thnaks to ALan Greenspan to make a sick economy appear healthy).

Then let's not forget the decades of the American Taliban fighting the Democrats to keep wages down and transferring the tax burden to the middle class so that now they don't have the buying power they once had. You can't have a healthy, growing economy if most of the people don't have enough after tax income to create it.