Unemployment at 8.9%; Highest in 25 Years
From Market Ticker
The only buffer to the job loss was temporary hiring by government for the Census, which was considerable. Without that there would have been real trouble in the jobs report. That hiring will continue for a while, but those are not permanent positions and in addition they’re something that comes every 10 years then then goes.
February was revised down from -651k to -681k (-30,000) and March was revised from -663k to -699k (-36,000). See a pattern there? That’s 66,000 jobs that were reported as existing but revised out later.
If you remember last month we were told that the “second derivative” had improved for the second month in a row.
Uh, no it didn’t. Here’s the table…
Now add in the 30,000 error over the last few months along with the Census temporary hiring and the rate of loss looks flat (within sampling error.)
Here’s the problem – to have a healthy economic recovery you need to gain about 300,000 jobs a month.
Growth of government and additional government jobs, does not a good economy make (that was my Yoda moment).
Private-sector employment fell by 611,000 jobs in April when government hiring was excluded, however. Rising government employment, through rapid hiring for the upcoming census, may give a false impression about employment trends.
The White House expressed cautious optimism about the numbers.
“It’s not as bad as expected,” Christina Romer, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, told CNBC television. However, she cautioned, 5.7 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007 and “every drop” of economic stimulus money will be needed to push the economy forward.
Statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the job losses reported in February downward by 30,000, but losses in March were revised upward by 36,000.
Employment in manufacturing fell by 149,000 jobs in April, while construction companies shed another 110,000 jobs. The professional and services industry saw employment fall by 122,000 posts last month and retailers rid themselves of 47,000 positions. Transportation and warehousing fell by 38,000 positions.
Among the few gainers were health care, adding another 17,000 jobs, and federal government jobs, which rose by 66,000 in April, mostly because of census hiring.
“The hiring of census workers is obscuring a continued steep decline in private-sector jobs. I think we have to start facing up to the fact we’re headed for an unemployment rate above 10 percent that will stay high for quite a while,” said Lawrence Mishel, the president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
If jobs in the private sector continue their downward trend and we do not look at honest statistics and analysis, we are in for another world of hurt, just like the financial sector. It’s time to report on objective, not subjective, data that gives the American public the real picture and jobs created in the public sector that do not produce anything or increase our GDP will not help us get our economy back on track, especially when considering long range strategic planning.
Unemployment News I’m Not Sad to Hear; More Lawyers to be Laid Off
It was bound to happen at one time or another. Lawyers are getting laid off and at a rate that is almost unprecedented. The job loss rate was up 66% last year compared to the previous ten years.
In America, there are always people to sue or contracts to negotiate, right? Apparently there aren’t enough.
The recession is taking a steep toll on the legal profession, an industry long seen as immune from the ups and downs of the economy. Trying to weather the financial crisis, the nation’s largest law firms are laying off attorneys and delaying the hiring of others.More than 3,000 lawyers have been laid off in the first three months of 2009.
“A lot of people go into the law because it’s one of those professions where you’re always going to have work. There aren’t typically big layoffs,” said Samuel Smith of Charlotte, N.C. “Realistically, I don’t think people saw this coming.”
[...]
The first time this year that three consecutive business days passed without one of the nation’s top law firms announcing job cuts came in mid-March, according to the Web site Lawshucks.com. They have counted 3,149 lawyer layoffs—just in the big firms, just in the first three months of the year.
The New York City Bar Association, for the first time in its more than 135 years, is offering career counseling services to lawyers between jobs.
Law firms are delaying the hiring of final-year law students, who normally are brought on a year in advance of graduation. Law students graduating with jobs this spring are being paid to delay their start date. Some are being told there will be no work until later in the year, maybe in 2010.
They mention my sentiment in this article for lawyers. I don’t have much sympathy since becoming a lawyer became a trend for many people – eventually when the market becomes saturated, jobs get cut. You can only have so many lawyers especially during an economic downturn. Lawyers also make a ridiculous amount of money right out of law school. No experience necessary to make six figures out of the gate. The annual salaries of lawyers were also going up much like school tuition and I never thought that bubble would burst!
For some Americans, there’s not much sympathy for lawyers who are suddenly jobless.
They make more money than the Average Joe, with the nation’s million-or-so employed lawyers averaging $118,280 in 2007, or $56.87 an hour, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And the number of out-of-work lawyers is minuscule compared with the manufacturing sector, which had 945,000 unemployed workers last year, or the construction industry, which saw more than 1 million jobs disappear in 2008.
The argument is that they have to go through a rigorous amount of schooling to get to where they are, but do they not think that business, finance, accounting folks or others have to go through the same ordeal to be more competitive and have a specialty? I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that, especially when plenty of my friends, whom I would otherwise, never consider lawyer material, can get law degrees. It’s just the “trendy” thing to do now.
Tommy Wells, president of the American Bar Association, said the increase in lawyer layoffs is partly the legal industry’s fault.
In the past, large law firms diversified by having lawyers work in areas such as bankruptcy and litigation that could support the corporate and mergers-and-acquisition work when the economy soured and vice versa, he noted.
“Firms probably got a bit out of balance in terms of their practice areas and put a lot of resources into areas that unfortunately are not nearly as active as they were a few years ago,” he said.
We have become a society of blame and entitlement and the excessive amount of lawyers has driven up medical costs, malpractice suits, prices for consumer products, you name it. So, it is difficult for me to find a lot of sympathy for the legal profession as a whole, other than just feeling bad that individual people may be out of work and down on their luck.
Job Losses to Increase, GDP to Decrease and Bankruptcies on the Rise
Sounds like RECOVERY to me! We haven’t even seen the affects from all the spending like increased prices, interest rates and inflation. Couple all of this with the liberal governors and mayors who are planning on increasing taxes during this economic contraction as well as other economic issues and distortions in the market such as the credit market, treasury receipts and quants, that have not seen their bottoms yet – and you are making one heck of a perfect storm!
The number of U.S. businesses and individuals declaring bankruptcy is rising with a vengeance amid the recession, despite a three-year-old federal law that made it much tougher for Americans to escape their debts, an Associated Press analysis found.
“There’s no end in sight,” said bankruptcy lawyer Bryan Elliott of Hickory, N.C., who is working seven days a week and scheduling prospective clients a month in advance. “To be doing this well and having this much business, it is depressing. It’s not a laugh-a-minute job.”
Nearly 1.2 million debtors filed for bankruptcy in the past 12 months, according to federal court records collected and analyzed by the AP. Last month, 130,831 sought bankruptcy protection – an increase of 46 percent over March 2008 and 81 percent over the same month in 2007.
Bob Lawless, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, said bankruptcies could reach 1.5 million this year and level off at 1.6 million next year – around the same time economists expect an economic recovery to begin.
Which gets into the credit market crisis that has yet to hit us, since the majority of individuals and businesses have spent beyond their means and maxed our their credit. Those who cannot pay back their debts are filing for bankruptcy and the banks and financial credit institutions are left holding the bag and cannot recover all of the money they loaned.
Then you have the new report that more people are becoming deliquent on their income taxes this year than years in the past. To me, this was an obvious occurrence, bound to happen due to the economic downturn and record high unemployment in the last couple of decades. Income taxes and tax returns are some of the greatest sources of revenue for the government, which is why I didn’t want people jumping on “this is a bull market rally” band wagon. There is still some dreadful news that will be reported and will not help the market.
The head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers says people should expect more job losses in the coming months.
But at the same time, Christina Romer said Tuesday that administration officials also are detecting “small little signs that maybe some parts of the economy are stabilizing.”
Romer declined to say specifically on NBC’s “Today” show how long she thought the current recession would last. But she said she believes administration officials “are being very pragmatic.”
She said, “We’ve got several more months of job loss, so we don’t really want to lead people to believe that spring is right here for the economy.”
Unemployment rates are lagging indicators of market conditions; however, stating that you expect more job losses for several more months is not the same thing as just a simple lag of a month or two that may see a slight rate increase.
“We know the economy’s still sick. We know we’ve got several more months of job loss, for example. We know that the numbers on GDP are almost surely going to be very bad for this quarter and next,” Romer, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on NBC’s “The Today Show.”
The U.S. economy lost 663,000 jobs last month, driving the unemployment rate to a 25-year high of 8.5 percent. Economists polled by Reuters expect the unemployment rate to rise to 9.8 percent a year from now.
Economists polled by Reuters expect GDP to contract by 5.0 percent in the first quarter of 2009 and 2 percent in the second quarter before edging into positive growth toward the end of the year.
I’m not so sure about that positive growth this year and those rose-colored glasses some of these “economists” have on. If you are going to increase taxes and spend, spend, spend – there is more to the story than what they are imagining it to be, especially if China is slowing up on buying our debt and treasury receipts are way down.
Obama to Make “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a Priority This Year
The official unemployment rate for March hovered around 8.5%!
-663,000 U.S. jobs were eliminated.
-There are now 13.2 million Americans looking for a job who can’t find even a part-time job.
-Yet, many of the nation’s richest foundations, most prestigious newspapers and top elected officials continue to call for an increase in foreign workers.
Numbersusa uses calculations based on the most recent government data estimate that the feds gave out. 138,000 permanent work permits (green cards for immigrants) and new temporary work permits (for temporary workers) to foreigners were given out during the month of March. That makes around 400,000 foreign workers during this new year of the new Administration and new Congress, which are acting just like the last Administration in callousness. You would think we had a jobs surplus and a worker shortage in this country with the way the feds behave.
Unemployment rate estimates are expected to increase from 8.5% and the “stimulus job creation” touted by the democrats from their pay-to-play recovery act will be canceled out (if there even was a real job stimulus from it in the first place) due to massive immigration reform such as what Obama is proposing.
Numberusa also has a great article about the stimulus and what it really means, if anything at all with the number of illegals coming in and becoming workers and if amnesty occurs what they will do to the job rate in the United States during a recession as well as the fact that the United States is no longer a producing country – we don’t have tons of jobs to give away – our country is now a service provider!
Here is what the Obama Administration would like to do this year (yet another priority)- they aren’t letting a good crisis go to waste:
While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Barack Obama plans to begin addressing America’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said Wednesday.
Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Munoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.
Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration organizations, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.
Some White House officials said immigration would not take precedence over the health care and energy proposals that Obama has identified as priorities. But the timetable is consistent with pledges that Obama made to Latino groups in last year’s campaign.
He said then that comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in his first year in office. Latino voters turned out strongly for Obama in the election.
Yet another shining example of how the Democrats and the Obama Administration do not believe in punishment or discipline when it comes to those who have broken the law or made bad decisions…
But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said immigration could become a polarizing issue for Obama in a year when he has many other major battles to fight.
The White House is calculating that public support for fixing the immigration system, which is widely acknowledged to be broken, will outweigh opposition from voters who argue that immigrants take jobs from Americans. A groundswell among voters opposed to legal status for illegal immigrants led to the defeat in 2007 of a bipartisan immigration bill that was strongly supported by President George W. Bush.
Administration officials said Obama’s plan would not add new workers to the American work force, but that it would recognize millions of illegal immigrants who have already been working in the United States.
I know a lot of moderate Democrats who are also against the idea of “comprehensive immigration reform.” Just like the Freedom of Choice Act or Card Check – they have nice little names that mislead you into thinking that they are good policies. This, however, is just a cover up for allowing illegals to get rights and citizenship without suffering the consequences (like being arrested or deported) for entering a country illegally and working here without paying income taxes etc.
Opponents of legalization legislation were incredulous at the idea that Obama would take on immigration when economic pain for Americans is so widespread.
Obama could care less about people – he cares about himself, his ideology and his policies – he only wants to pass an agenda no matter who is hurts or destroys along the way – like American workers and American jobs.
This is just another power grab so liberals can have a majority for years to come. This, along with the census, health-care and education will tie down generations of Americans to the government and make them dependent on a power-hungry Washington, D.C.
Mortgage Delinquencies, Unemployment and Credit Defaults – Highest Rates in Years
More U.S. consumers are falling behind on their mortgages, an indication that the housing market has yet to hit bottom, a top credit bureau executive told Reuters.
Dann Adams, president of U.S. Information Systems for Equifax Inc, reported that 7 percent of homeowners with mortgages were at least 30 days late on their loans in February, an increase of more than 50 percent from a year earlier.
He also said 39.8 percent of subprime borrowers were at least 30 days behind on their home mortgage loans, up 23.7 percent from last year.
The Equifax data also reveals the impact of the rise in unemployment, which is at its highest rate since 1983. Employers cut 663,000 jobs in March, sending the national unemployment rate to 8.5 percent, the Labor Department said on Friday.
The rising jobless rate manifests itself in consumers’ increasing reliance on credit cards even as lenders try to restrict access to credit, Adams said.
The data shows that lenders have good reason to be wary. Bank card delinquency is at its highest level in the past five years. Some 4.5 percent of total balances on bank-issued credit cards were at 60 days past due in February, a 32.7 percent increase from a year earlier.
