Jobs Decrease by 54,000, Rise by 60,000 Excluding Census; Unemployment Rises Slightly to 9.6%; A Look Beneath the Surface
by ilene - September 4th, 2010 3:13 am
Jobs Decrease by 54,000, Rise by 60,000 Excluding Census; Unemployment Rises Slightly to 9.6%; A Look Beneath the Surface
Courtesy of Mish
This morning the BLS reported a decrease of 64,000 jobs. However, that reflects a decrease of 114,000 temporary census workers.
Excluding the census effect, government lost 7,000 jobs. Were the trend to continue, this would be a good thing because Firing Public Union Workers Creates Real Jobs.
Unfortunately, politicians and Keynesian clown economists will not see it that way. Indeed there is a $26 billion bill giving money to the states to keep bureaucrats employed. This is unfortunate because we need to shed government jobs.
Birth-Death Model
Hidden beneath the surface the BLS Black Box – Birth Death Model added 115,000 jobs, a number likely to be revised lower in coming years. Please note you cannot directly subtract the number from the total because of the way the BLS computes its overall number.
Participation Rate Effects
The civilian labor force participation rate (64.7 percent) and the employment-population ratio (58.5 percent) were essentially unchanged from last month’s report. However, these measures have declined by 0.5 percentage points and 0.3 points, respectively, since April.
The drop in participation rate this year is the only reason the unemployment rate is not over 10%. The drop in participation rates is not that surprising because some of the long-term unemployed stopped looking jobs, or opted for retirement.
Nonetheless, I still do not think the top in the unemployment rate is in and expect it may rise substantially later this year as the recovery heads into a coma and states are forced to cut back workers unless Congress does substantially more to support states.
Employment and Recessions
Calculated Risk has a great chart showing the effects of census hiring as well as the extremely weak hiring in this recovery.
click on chart for sharper image
The dotted lines tell the real story about how pathetic a jobs recovery this has been. Bear in mind it has taken $trillions in stimulus to produce this.
June, July Revisions
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from -221,000 to -175,000, and the change for July was revised from -131,000 to -54,000.
Those revisions look good but it is important to note where the revisions comes from. The loss of government jobs in June was revised from…
ADP Jobs Report WAY Below Expectations
by ilene - June 30th, 2010 1:44 pm
ADP Jobs Report WAY Below Expectations
Courtesy of Vincent Fernando at Clusterstock
Yet another huge disappointment for markets to digest — ADP’s June employment report showed just 13,000 new jobs were added from May to June on a seasonally-adjusted basis, vs. 61,000 expected. That’s clearly a huge miss.
While the report continued to show job creation, the rate of new jobs fell substantially from the 55,000 reported last month. The latest 13,000 new jobs is also far below the five month average of 34,000 new jobs per month, based on ADP. Thus there has been an obvious deceleration.
ADP:
Recent ADP Report data suggest that, following steady improvement through April, private employment may have decelerated heading into the summer. The slow pace of improvement from February through June is consistent with other publicly available data, including a pause in the decline of initial unemployment claims that occurred during the winter months.
Small businesses have even begun to cut jobs:
Large businesses, defined as those with 500 or more workers, saw employment increase by 3,000 and employment among medium-size businesses, defined as those with between 50 and 499 workers increased by 11,000. Employment among small-size businesses, defined as those with fewer than 50 workers, decreased by 1,000 in June.*
This is a huge change from the 13,000 jobs ADP said small businesses created in the previous month.
See the full report below.
FINAL Report June 10