The $2 Trillion Public Pension Hole and What You Can Do About It
by ilene - March 15th, 2010 1:15 pm
As I mentioned last week, I find the multi-billion dollar gifting to bankers and the ultra-rich much more troublesome than Unions, but here’s Mish’s perspective on Unions and the problems they pose for state budgets. - Ilene
The $2 Trillion Public Pension Hole and What You Can Do About It
Courtesy of Mish
The cover story of Barron’s is on public pensions, an issue I have been railing about for years, and heatedly so for several months. Please consider The $2 Trillion Hole.
LIKE A CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE, populist rage burns over bloated executive compensation and unrepentant avarice on Wall Street.
Deserving as these targets may or may not be, most Americans have ignored at their own peril a far bigger pocket of privilege — the lush pensions that the 23 million active and retired state and local public employees, from cops and garbage collectors to city managers and teachers, have wangled from taxpayers.
Some 80% of these public employees are beneficiaries of defined-benefit plans under which monthly pension payments are guaranteed, no matter how stocks and other volatile assets backing the retirement plans perform. In contrast, most of the taxpayers footing the bill for these public-employee benefits (participants’ contributions to these plans are typically modest) have been pushed by their employers into far less munificent defined-contribution plans and suffered the additional indignity of seeing their 401(k) accounts shrivel in the recent bear market in stocks.
Most public employees, if they hang around to retirement, can count on pensions equal to 75% to 90% of their pay in their highest-earning years. And many public employees earn even more in retirement than their best year’s base compensation as a result of "spiking" their last year’s income by working ferocious amounts of overtime and rolling in years of unused sick and vacation days into their final-year pay computation.
THE PROSPECTS ARE BLEAK for many state and local governments as a result of all this. According to a survey last month by the Pew Center on the States, a nonpartisan research group, eight states — Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and West Virginia — lack funding for more than a third of their pension liabilities. Thirteen others are less than 80% funded.
The more likely outcome is dramatic cuts in essential services, such as police and fire protection, health spending, education and infrastructure improvements, in order to cover ballooning pension payments. State and municipalities, after all, must do something: Most have a legal…
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Where Have We Been; Where Are We Going?
by ilene - March 15th, 2010 12:58 pm
Where Have We Been; Where Are We Going?
Courtesy of James Howard Kunstler
Driving down the broad avenues of Cleveland, Ohio, was like flipping through the pages of a picture book about the rise and fall of our industrial empire. Where demolitions had not removed things — a lot was gone — stood the residue of a society so different from ours that you felt momentarily transported to another planet where a different race of beings had gone about their business.
Among the qualities most visible in the recent ruins of that lost society is the secure confidence expressed in its buildings. Even the most modest factory or business establishment built before the 20th century included decorations and motifs devised for no other reason but to be beautiful – towers, swags, medallions, cartouches — as if to state we are joined proudly in a great enterprise to make good things happen in this world. This was true not just of Cleveland, of course, but the whole nation, for a while anyway.
Equally arresting are the changes visible in the collective demeanor from the mid-20th century, especially after the Second World War, when the adolescent panache of a rising economy had morphed into the grinding force of a place devoted to the production of anything. The memory of the Great Depression lingered like a metabolic disorder, and the spirit of the place was no longer caught up in the muscular exuberance of self-discovery but the sheer determination to stay powerful and alive. This phase didn’t last long.
By the 1970s, signs of a new illness were clear. Production was moving someplace else, incomes and household security with it. An existential pall settled over the city as ominous symptoms of waning vitality showed up in the organs of production. Steel-making and car-making staggered. Even the Cuyahoga river caught on fire, as if fate was a practical joke. Major retail was moving elsewhere — to the suburban outlands — where so many of the people who worked in the downtown towers had already fled. The population that remained in the city center was made of recently uprooted agricultural quasi-serfs who had only just come up to the city a generation before to make better livings in the factories that were all of a sudden shutting down. It seemed like a kind of swindle and they were understandably angry about it.
These days, reading…
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Regional Employment Report: Unemployment Rate up in 30 States, Down in 9; Manufacturing States Benefit Most
by ilene - March 10th, 2010 2:39 pm
Regional Employment Report: Unemployment Rate up in 30 States, Down in 9; Manufacturing States Benefit Most
Courtesy of Mish
In a headline trumpeting the wrong thing, Bloomberg is reporting Unemployment Decreased in Nine U.S. States in January.
The unemployment rate decreased in nine U.S. states in January and climbed in 30, signaling the thawing of the labor market is not broad-based.
The jobless rate in Michigan showed the biggest drop, falling to 14.3 percent, still the highest in the nation, from 14.5 percent in December, according to figures issued today by the Labor Department in Washington. New York and New Jersey were among eight states where unemployment decreased by a tenth of a point.
A national unemployment projected to average 9.8 percent this year signals state budgets will be strained by decreases in tax revenue and rising jobless insurance payments. The loss of 8.4 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007 means the labor market in the world’s largest economy will take years to rebound.
“This is a recovery that’s really kind of concentrated,” said Steven Cochrane, director of regional economics at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “It still portends weakness in income-tax revenue and sales-tax revenue into fiscal year 2011.”
Unemployment in the Detroit area, home to General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co., dropped to 15.3 percent from 16 percent in December, contributing to the decrease in Michigan’s jobless rate.
States showing the most improvement in coming months will probably be those with a large manufacturing base, said Moody’s Economy.com’s Cochrane. The need to rebuild inventories and growing exports is propelling a factory rebound that will help some parts of the country over others, he said.
Unemployment in California, Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina and the District of Columbia climbed to the highest levels since records began in 1976.
Regional and State Report
With that backdrop let’s take a look at the actual data from the BLS Regional and State Employment and Unemployment Report for January 2010.
Thirty states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate increases, 9 states registered rate decreases, and 11 states had no rate change, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the year, jobless rates increased in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The national unemployment rate fell from 10.0 percent in December to 9.7 percent in January, but was up from 7.7 percent a year earlier.
In January, nonfarm payroll employment increased in 31 states and the…
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Dissonance Overload, Needs and “Innovation”
by ilene - March 8th, 2010 1:38 pm
Dissonance Overload, Needs and "Innovation"
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
Are "businesses" which aggregate user-provided content in order to serve adverts to those users "innovative?" Are they serving a "need" or attempting to contrive a new "need"?
While I usually present a specific thesis here, today’s topic is more a "work in progress" as I think through the paradoxes and connections between "needs" and contrived needs.
The two beginning data points are the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, and an article from BusinessWeek on the dozens of Silicon Valley startups founded or funded by Google alumni: And Google Begat…The search giant’s former employees are seeding tech startups— and shaping another wave of innovation.
A friend’s son recently served a Peace Corps stint in a remote Vanuatu village. There is no electricity–illumination is provided by candles–and fresh potable water is a 2 kilometer walk away. The village pursues a generally traditional lifestyle apparently by choice; if you want to own a car and drive around in Western-style petroleum-based affluence, you can do so in the nation’s capital.
In the village, the women reportedly do most of the heavy lifting (agriculture, childcare, etc.) while the men have sufficient free time to brew up some hootch (kava) to enjoy in afternoon conviviality.
This "subsistance" is not poverty in the sense that people have enough to eat, shelter, some basic education, relative security from the predations of the State and/or external marauders (in our era, global Neoliberal Capitalism of the predatory/cartel variety).
This lifestyle is, with modest variations such as kerosene lamps or limited electricity, still lived by hundreds of millions of human beings. It is not to be romanticized or distorted by global-market, post-industrial definitions of "poverty." There are all sorts of poverty once you have enough to eat, a community and shelter, and definitions of a "good life" and a "better life" have to be carefully parsed.
We, on the other hand, are embedded in advanced, post-industrial Neoliberal Capitalism– post-industrial in the sense that most of the nasty bits are performed elsewhere, so "we" get to live with high standards of environmental control, and Neoliberal in the sense that the Savior State is an active partner with global predatory finance Capitalism to exploit both foreign markets and domestic populations.
By the standards of our status quo, residents of Vanuatu are living at "Stone Age" levels which are far below the "poverty" of our low-income citizenry. That the teens…
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Jobs Contract By 36,000; Unemployment Rate Steady At 9.7%; No Snow Effect
by ilene - March 5th, 2010 7:01 pm
Jobs Contract By 36,000; Unemployment Rate Steady At 9.7%; No Snow Effect
Courtesy of Mish
Today the BLS reported 36,000 job losses with the unemployment rate holding at 9.7%. Before diving into the numbers let’s analyze the snow job ahead of the report.
Speaking before Congress, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke harped about snow, warning policymakers will "to be careful about not overinterpreting" the upcoming data." In the wake of that warning, economists busily upped their projections for job losses in February, some by as much as 220,000 jobs.
I talked about that yesterday in Range of Snow Impact on Jobs: Negligible to 220,000; Have Your Snow Job Decoder Ring Handy?
Snow Job Decoding
Did 220,000 people not receive any pay for the period in question?
Color me skeptical.
In terms of the unemployment rate, the blizzards will not have an effect. In terms of the reported jobs number there will be an impact but the most likely impact is in the number of hours worked.
Regardless, expectations as to the importance of the blizzard range from negligible all the way to 220,000. Whatever the affect was, it will be over by next month although I have seen analysis that says the effects will last until May.
In today’s job report, the BLS chimed in about snow, confirming the above.
BLS Confirms Bernanke’s Snow Job
Effect of Severe Winter Storms on Employment Estimates
Major winter storms affected parts of the country during the February reference periods for the establishment and household surveys.
In the establishment survey, the reference period was the pay period including February 12th. In order for severe weather conditions to reduce the estimate of payroll employment, employees have to be off work for an entire pay period and not be paid for the time missed. About half of all workers in the payroll survey have a 2-week, semimonthly, or monthly pay period. Workers who received pay for any part of the reference pay period, even one hour, are counted in the February payroll employment figures.
While some persons may have been off payrolls during the survey reference period, some industries, such as those dealing with cleanup and repair activities, may have added workers.
In the household survey, the reference period was the calendar week of February 7-13. People who miss work for weather-related events are counted as employed whether or not they are paid for the time off.
Should Bernanke Have Known That?
Yes. Did he know that and make misleading statements hoping to get economists to…
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Jobless Friday - US, Japan and Europe Add More Stimulus
by Phil - March 5th, 2010 7:43 am
Wheee - more free money!
The money train left the station just ahead of the US market close yesterday when the House passed a $15Bn Jobs Bill although it remains to be seen if Jim Bunning will pass it. China doesn’t need Bunning’s permission to hand out free money and they will be "allocating 63.2 Billion Yuan" to fight high housing prices by SUBSIDIZING low-cost housing. Come to think of it - I object to that! Someone in China needs a lesson in some basic economics…
The big boost this morning came from Japan, where bonds hit the highest level of the year after the Nikkei newspaper said the central bank at its March 16 meeting may discuss additional monetary easing steps. It doesn’t matter whether this report is true or not as it already did it’s job and shot the Nikkei up 223 points for the day, erasing two week’s worth of losses in a single session. It’s hard for the BOJ to get easier than our own Fed but Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said yesterday he needs evidence of “highly sustainable” growth before supporting tighter monetary policy, while James Bullard of the St. Louis Fed said the central bank should remain “accommodative” - these are, of course, the Fed’s code words for MORE FREE MONEY!
Of course, our Futures are up 1% from yesterday’s low and the commodity markets LOVE IT and oil is back at $80.65 with copper back at $3.40 despite "weak" demand in China, where stockpiles of copper are now at 7-year highs and even Goldman Sachs has withdrawn their buy recommendation on coppper because of concern that economic recovery in developed markets isn’t on “solid footing.” “About 60 percent of China’s copper is used in the power industry, and our sales to wire-and-cable users reflected that demand is rather weak,” Chairman Wei Jianghong said, while attending the National People’s Congress.
“The demand is not very strong in the first place,” Jiangxi Copper Chairman Li said in Beijing while at the congress. “But a lot of people have long positions in the market, so I think in the first half of this year, copper prices will be good.” Copper stockpiles in China jumped to 149,478 tons for the week ended Feb. 26, 28 percent more than the week ended Feb. 12, according to the Shanghai Futures Exchange. Demand from China for global supplies may weaken because prices on the Shanghai Futures Exchange are now close to those in London, discouraging arbitrage trading, Goldman Sachs analysts…
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Weekly Unemployment Claims At 469,000; Prepare for Friday’s BLS Snow Job
by ilene - March 4th, 2010 5:08 pm
Weekly Unemployment Claims At 469,000; Prepare for Friday’s BLS Snow Job
Courtesy of Mish
Inquiring minds are investigating the Unemployment Weekly Claims Report for March 4, 2010.
In the week ending Feb. 27, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 469,000, a decrease of 29,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 498,000. The 4-week moving average was 470,750, a decrease of 3,500 from the previous week’s revised average of 474,250.
Weekly Unemployment Claims
The weekly claims numbers are volatile so it’s best to focus on the trend in the 4-week moving average. That 4-week average has not show any improvement for quite some time.
4-Week Moving Average of Initial Claims
4-Week Moving Average of Initial Claims Detail
The 4-week moving average of claims for the last three weeks is above where it was on December 12, 2009 and just slightly better than it was on December 5, 2009. By this measure, the recovery has stalled.
Blaming The Weather
A week ago in "Nascent" Recovery or "Nascent" Economic Collapse? I noted how economists were blaming the weather for last week’s rise in weekly claims and possible jump in the monthly job report.
Weather Related Questions
I have a few simple questions for all the dim-bulb economists now blaming the weather:
- "Did you not know there was a snowstorm on the East coast?"
- "If you did, then why didn’t you factor it in to your estimates?"
- "How can you be surprised by something you knew?"
Bernanke’s Snow Job
To refresh your memory, last week Bernanke blamed the weather for the jump in claims and warned about overinterpreting the data.
From Yahoo Finance Jobless claims rise due to weather-related factors.
"Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a congressional committee that the snowstorms are likely to have a short-term — but not permanent — effect on unemployment and layoffs. He said policymakers will "have to be careful about not overinterpreting" the upcoming data."
Summers Shovels Snow
Inquiring minds are reading Summers Shovels Snow on Winter’s Job Prospects by Caroline Baum.
Summers came out of virtual retirement Tuesday to tell CNBC the blizzards last month were likely to distort February’s employment statistics. It’s “very important to look past whatever the next figures are to gauge the underlying trends,” the White House economic adviser said in a TV interview.
What he really meant was, it’s important to look past bad numbers.
At the risk of inspiring accusations of naivete from conspiracy theorists convinced government agencies cook up the numbers in the basement, I decided to go to the source.
The only people who know the…
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Thrilling Thursday - Consumers Still Unemployed, but Shopping!
by Phil - March 4th, 2010 8:23 am
The MSM is so happy about the February Monster Employment Index!
They’ll tell you it’s up 10 points from January without mentioning that January was the worst month of the past 12 and, in reality, we are up just 2 points from last February when the shockingly poor data we were seeing sent the S&P all the way to 666 the next month. Today though, it is considered a reason to rally as people watching the MSM will believe anything the talking heads tell them because they don’t get shown the actual results and they trust their talking heads to have checked the facts carefully, rather than make them up, which is pretty much what they do.
We discussed the shenanigans of the ADP report in yesterday’s post and I did warn you that it was a fake rally based on happy headlines papering over poor data. As we expected, the market giddiness persisted until about 11:30 and then reality began to bite back. This was FANTASTIC for us as we were playing bearish into the rally but it’s very scary to hold bearish positions overnight but there’s no reason to hold options overnight when you pick up plays like our 9:54 Alert play on the DIA $103 puts, which averaged in at .77, hit $1 (up 30%) at 2:45 and finished the day at .94 (up 22%). You HAVE to learn to be satisfied with making 20% on day trades and cashing back out. Cash is flexible - overnight positions are not… In fact, since we did cash out yesterday, I was able to send out an overnight Alert to Members with a short on the oil Futures as they ran up to 80.50 which was good for a quick victory and then another this morning at $81, which is already up .30 with a .06 trailing stop (futures pay $10 per penny per contract so lots of fun for morning, pre-market trading!).
We went longer on our oil and gold shorts (in yesterday’s post it was GLL Apr $9 calls at .65) because we don’t expect them to resolve quickly but the chart on the left illustrates why we also firmly believe that this commodity rally is BS. This is a chart of the Employment to Population Ratio for Men 25-54 Years Old since WWII. Kind of puts a 2% year over year rise in the Monster Employment Index into perspective doesn’t it? 20% of the men in the United States of America between the ages…
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70% Of The Elderly Aren’t Retiring Because They Can’t Afford To Anymore
by ilene - March 3rd, 2010 1:00 pm
Following up on our earlier article by Tom Lindmark, Can Americans Work Longer? While working longer has many positives on an individual basis, when jobs are scarce, there’s still the problem of more competition for fewer jobs. - Ilene
70% Of The Elderly Aren’t Retiring Because They Can’t Afford To Anymore
Courtesy of Vincent Fernando at Clusterstock/Business Insider
A new survey from Career Builder exposes what will be an increasingly common trend as America ages demographically — older workers are being forced to keep working and postpone retirement for financial reasons.
More than seven-in-ten (72 percent) workers over the age of 60 who said they are putting off their retirement are doing so because they can’t afford to retire financially, according to a new survey by CareerBuilder.
The good news is that many older workers are putting off retirement for positive reasons as well.
About 70% of workers delaying retirement said they are doing so partly because they enjoy their jobs according to CareerBuilder. Hence there are many Americans who are, yes, putting off retirement for financial reasons, but at the same time are pretty happy to do so since they enjoy working.
Such job satisfaction will become necessary for most young Americans, since fully supporting retirees from ~60 years onwards will be simply untenable as an increasing proportion of America becomes old due to demographic change and extended life expectancies. Already, in 2012 about 1 in 3 American workers will be over 50 years old according to The Economist.
Thus the financial crisis may have delivered an unwanted wake-up call. Americans will need to quickly learn how to work longer into their silver years.
Luckily, as the satisfaction rates in the survey above show, this situation might not be as bad as you’d expect. Let’s hope.
Read more on this trend at The Economist >
See Also:
ADP: January Job Losses Were Actually TRIPLE What We Thought, And No, We Won’t Blame The Snowicane
Here’s What Today’s ISM Number Suggests About Job Creation In February
BREAKING: Savers Still Don’t Make Jack
(What's this?)
(Random Roger's Big Picture, 2/18/10)
(Random Roger's Big Picture, 1/11/10)
(The Kaighn Report, 2/21/10)
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Which Way Wednesday - The Beige Book Boogie
by Phil - March 3rd, 2010 8:15 am
The last Beige Book report was on January 13th.
At the time the futures were flying and we were bullish but Dow was looking toppy and I thought we were going too far, too fast and called for caution - despite our "Meatball Market" at the time. Just like yesterday, I was not happy with the fundamentals to the point where I felt it necessary to keep pointing them out while the parade of analysts at CNBC et al told everyone to BUYBUYBUY at the 10,750 top. I don’t like to be Chicken Little but sometimes the sky is actually falling! The January book had very little "good" news to report (see my analysis for Members that day) and we took our money and ran on the long side. Although it wasn’t until the next Tuesday that we actually went down - it was a doozy and we fell over 500 points in 3 days, all the way to 10,165 (our 5% rule) and we continued weakly through 2/8, when we bottomed out at 9,900.
Whoever said this charting stuff was complicated? Just follow the 5% rule, draw some lines and PRESTO - we know what’s going to happen! Well, at least we hope we know what’s going to happen because I’ve spent a good portion of my week so far telling Members NOT to trust the rally we’ve been having and to expect a downturn with today’s Beige book a possible catalyst for a correction. From experience, we know there is not generally an immediate reaction to what is essentially a collection of anecdotal evidence about the state of the economy but it does give us an overview of the nation and I haven’t seen much news in the 6 weeks since the last report to make me think this one will be showing any great improvements.
It’s a tough call at the moment because there is clearly a determined effort to get the markets to move up but we are loaded up with bullish plays from our visit to 9,900 so it pays to be a bit more bearish with our short-term plays as we test the top of our MAYBE range. We have had some good news this morning with MBA Mortgage Applications up 14.6% as rates fell back under the magic 5% mark and, of course, that’s a rebound off of last week’s TERRIBLE showing, probably weather related.
69% of the activity was refinancing, which is nice but it doesn’t move homes or employ any construction…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(