This conservative outrage machine story yesterday and today about Commerce Secretary Raimondo has got to be the dumbest one I've heard in a long time

 She was asked an ignorant question.

Why would the Commerce Secretary have something timely to say about employment revisions released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Labor Department?

It's not her area. I wouldn't expect her to know anything about it, and if I had a brain I wouldn't bother asking her.

Commerce and Labor are two separate cabinet level departments and have been since 1913.

I don't expect the Commerce Secretary to have the latest labor information anymore than I expect the Labor Secretary to be able to respond to the latest GDP report produced by the BEA at the Commerce Dept.

But all the ignorami on the right, but I repeat myself, are up in arms over this. It's embarrassing.

What's really going on here is outrage over the size of the revision, which is the largest since 2009.

Republicans want to say Biden and Harris have been lying about the jobs numbers for a year to make themselves look better.

That's a crock. The initial benchmark revisions occur every year around this time, and their size should be no surprise since the Employment Situation Summary every month contains revisions upon revisions upon revisions of prior months. This happens all the time, and if you know you know that this year the numbers have been particularly susceptible of large revisions, criticism, and expressed suspicions from the FOMC members on down.

But total nonfarm payrolls have always been this way. They are quick and dirty on any day. I gave up following them in favor of other measures precisely because it involves securing jello on a galley plate in high seas, and I have better things to do.

Full time employment, measured with other data, around 50% of population under Joe Biden hasn't been great, and it hasn't been awful either. In my arrogant opinion, following total nonfarm and its endless stream of revisions is a fool's errand.

Even more foolish to get upset about it when plenty of other indicators show that employment up until this summer has been "secularly tight", as one economist likes to put it. Continued claims for unemployment have been steady as she goes since late 2021.

The slight recent elevation in these claims numbers is consistent with a softening of employment, which I have noted elsewhere in regard to full time jobs.

The bloom is off the rose it seems, but the preliminary total nonfarm benchmark revision down 819,000 is a problem with that model, not a sign of a sudden problem with employment. 

 

Inflation more durable than policymakers had anticipated, Joe Biden most hurt

 This week provided a reminder that inflation isn’t going away anytime soon :

The bad news began Monday when a New York Federal Reserve survey showed the consumer expectations over the longer term had accelerated in February. It continued Tuesday with news that consumer prices rose 3.2% from a year ago, and then culminated Thursday with a release indicating that pipeline pressures at the wholesale level also are heating up. ...

The latest jolt on inflation came Thursday when the Labor Department reported that the producer price index, a forward-looking measure of pipeline inflation at the wholesale level, showed a 0.6% increase in February. That was double the Dow Jones estimate and pushed the 12-month level up 1.6%, the biggest move since September 2023.

 

Contact your utility commission and complain about natural gas and electricity prices not coming down

 Utilities Get an Inflation Shock

Electricity and gas providers are encountering a pushback on rate increases:

 

Utilities get to pass through fuel prices, which means customers have been bearing the burden of higher natural-gas prices that surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On average, monthly electricity prices rose 13% in 2022 from a year earlier and 6% in the first 11 months of 2023, according to data from the Labor Department. ... Utility commissioners are either appointed by elected officials or elected themselves, which means they are sensitive to the financial pressures that ratepayers face. ... utilities were quick to ask for an increase on the allowed return on equity when market measures of capital cost rose yet slow to adjust rates when those measures declined.     

 

Has the natural gas portion of your utility bill dropped 60% like the price of natural gas in 2023 from 2022? Mine sure as hell has not.

Here are the average prices per year for Henry Hub natural gas:

2015: 2.62

2016: 2.52

2017: 2.99

2018: 3.15

2019: 2.56

2020: 2.03

2021: 3.89 +91.6%

2022: 6.45 +65.8%

2023: 2.53 -60.7%

That 92% jump in 2021 had nothing to do with Ukraine.

We're being gouged for green energy tomfoolery.

 

COMPLAIN, not to the utility, but to the utility commission. It's the only way.

 

In Michigan, go to:

 

https://www.michigan.gov/mpsc

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fox Business' broad inflation report contained an error

 Here's Megan Henney, September 29th :

An inflation measure closely watched by the Federal Reserve ticked higher in August as steep prices continue to squeeze millions of U.S. households.

The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index showed that consumer prices rose 0.4% from the previous month, according to the Labor Department. On an annual basis, prices climbed 3.5% — up from 3.3% recorded the previous month, underscoring the challenge of taming high inflation.

She's referring to PCEPI. 

That measure isn't up from 3.3% the previous month. It's up from 3.4%, and 3.2% the month before that.

Jeff Cox at CNBC got it right, same day, as usual:

Including food and energy, headline PCE increased 0.4% on the month and 3.5% from a year ago. Headline inflation has been creeping higher in recent months after hitting 3.2% in June.

Forbes also had it right, because it actually checked the most recent data, which Fox evidently did not:

The most recent PCE price index data was released on September 29, 2023, covering the month of August. The headline August PCE inflation figure was +3.5% year over year, which was up slightly from the revised annual rate of +3.4% in July.

 

 

 

Child care prices rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation

The national average price of daycare and preschool services rose 6% in July from a year before, the Labor Department reported recently. That was nearly double the overall inflation rate of 3.2%, which was down from its recent peak of 9.1% in June last year. ... a mother of three living in Blaine, Minn. ... said she is paying about $2,500 a month for child care this summer.

More.

Headline payrolls in 2019 may be overstating the real numbers by more than 25%

The Myth of the Tight U.S. Labor Market:

Months from now, the Establishment Survey will undergo its annual retrospective benchmark revision, based almost entirely on the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages conducted by the Labor Department. ...

The latest QCEW data are available through 2018, but note how much worse the 2018 QCEW data look than the Establishment Survey data, even though the two appear fairly similar in previous years, for which the latter has already undergone the requisite revisions. The Establishment Survey’s nonfarm jobs figures will clearly be revised down as the QCEW data show job growth averaging only 177,000 a month in 2018. That means the Establishment Survey may be overstating the real numbers by more than 25%.

LOL Larry Kudlow: 22,000 new payrolls in February 2019 "fluky", but 54,000 in May 2011 "meager", economy "sputtering", possibly a sign of recession

Obama Owns This Unemployment Report:

In recent weeks, a whole bunch of new economic stats have been pointing to a sputtering economy -- maybe even an inflation-prone, less-than-2-percent-growth recession. Stocks have dropped five straight weeks, as they look toward slower growth, jobs, and profits out to year end. And Friday's jobs report didn't buck these trends.

"Anemic" is the adjective being tossed around the media. According to the Labor Department, nonfarm payrolls increased a meager 54,000 in May, while private payrolls gained only 83,000. A week or two ago, Wall Street expected 200,000-plus new jobs. Didn't happen.

Since the 1990s 144,000 manufacturing and related jobs lost in Wisconsin due to free-trade agreements

Reported here:

Wisconsin has lost more than more than 68,000 manufacturing jobs since the mid-1990s and the first of several controversial trade pacts with Mexico, China and others took hold.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor has certified about 76,000 Wisconsin workers in various fields as having lost their jobs due to either imports or the work they do being shipped overseas. ... 

Caterpillar has laid off about 600 of its 800-plus workers over the past two years because of a business slowdown. ...

Wisconsin’s heavy manufacturing sector, once one of the country’s strongest, has been taking a lot of punches in recent years. General Motors, General Electric, Chrysler, Joy Global Surface Mining and Manitowoc Cranes have all cut jobs or closed operations in recent years for a variety of reasons.

Hometown companies such as Kohler, the plumbing supply manufacturer; and Trek Bicycles have offshored jobs to India, China and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, Madison, the state capital, will lose 1,000 jobs over the next two years as the 100-year-old iconic Oscar Mayer meat processing plant shuts down. And just east on I-94 in Jefferson, Tyson Foods will cease operations at its pepperoni processing plant, cutting 400 jobs.

Federal Reserve and FDIC lose power

Electrical, but hey! we can dream can't we?

From the story here:

"Most power at the State Department was lost and employees were told to work as best they could. Other buildings affected included the Federal Reserve, the General Services Administration, Metro’s Smithsonian subway station, the Labor Department, the U.S. Park Police and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp."

Maybe Ted Cruz & Company have been trying to shut down the government the wrong way!

Low Wage Workers Get Reduced Hours, Probably Due To ObamaCare, The Rest Work More

So says Jed Graham for Investors.com, here, echoing our posts on part-timers who represent just 20% of the usually employed and are too few in number to ding the customary measures of hours, which are aggregate measures, when they are reduced because of ObamaCare considerations by their employers:

Low-wage workers clocked the shortest workweek on record in December — even shorter than at the depth of the recession, new Labor Department data showed Friday.

The figures underscore concerns about the ObamaCare employer insurance mandate's impact on the work hours and incomes of low-wage earners.

It's impossible to know how much of the drop relates to ObamaCare, but there's good reason to suspect a strong connection. The workweek has been getting shorter in many of the same industries where anecdotes have piled up about employers cutting hours to evade the law's penalties. ...

IBD's gauge of the low-wage workweek, now at 27.4 hours, includes the 30 million nonmanagers working in private industries where pay averages up to $14.50 an hour. ...

[T]he workweek has moved higher for non-low-wage workers. This group, including managers and those in higher-paying industries, is now clocking a longer week than prior to the recession.

That divergence explains why many economists and nonpartisan arbiters like the Congressional Budget Office have concluded that ObamaCare has had no impact on part-time employment. The effect doesn't show up in aggregate workforce data, but that is the wrong place to look.

First Time Claims For Unemployment Surge Above 300,000 Breaking Long Streak

Not-seasonally-adjusted first time claims for unemployment surged back above 300,000 for the first time in over two months in today's report, here, to nearly 337,000. First time claims in this category had been averaging 269,000 weekly for ten weeks.

Separate stories indicate computer problems still plague California reporting after all, and that figures today included some catching-up because of that, on top of furloughs of non-federal workers affected by the shutdown. Michigan also reported truncated data due to conversion to a new computer system there, so it may be some time before a more accurate picture emerges. 

The Department of Labor did not include the link to prior data in this week's report.

IBD Poll Puts Unemployment At 31%: 47.9 Million Looking For Work, 2 Times Higher Than BLS U6 Level

Here:

Investor's Business Daily has been polling Americans each month on the job market for well over a decade. Unlike the numbers released each month by the Labor Department, ours haven't been crunched, tweaked, twisted, seasonally adjusted or otherwise tortured to tell a comforting story. ... In our IBD/TIPP Poll, we ask a different question: "How many members of your household are currently unemployed and are looking for employment?" Not surprisingly, the answer we get differs greatly from the government's data. This month's survey, completed Thursday night, indicated that 47.9 million Americans are looking for work. No, that's not a misprint: 47.9 million. Out of a workforce of 154 million, that yields a gross unemployment rate of 31%. Among all households, 26% have at least one member looking for work.

------------------------------------------

The U6 unemployment rate of 13.7% in August is the combination of the officially unemployed, 11.3 million, the marginally attached to the labor force, 2.3 million, and the part-time for economic reasons, 7.9 million. That comes to 21.5 million unemployed in August by the broadest official government measure. The IBD poll puts the level 2.23 times higher than that at 47.9 million.

4th Delay Of ObamaCare Provisions Revealed By The New York Times

The case builds for dropping insurance coverage altogether. Its basic cost only soars, and what it covers only plummets. That was the whole point behind ObamaCare, to completely wreck the free market in health insurance, and the entrepreneurs at the heart of it providing the healthcare, the doctors. 

Tip of the hat to Avik Roy of Forbes, here:

"According to the law, the limits on out-of-pocket costs for 2014 were $6,350 for individual policies and $12,700 for family ones. But in February, the Department of Labor published a little-noticed rule delaying the cap until 2015. The delay was described yesterday by Robert Pear in the New York Times."

The Millions Who Lost Their Jobs, 2001-2012

What follows are first time claims for unemployment compensation, not-seasonally-adjusted, by year from 2001 through 2012, using Department of Labor figures, here, rounded to the nearest thousand weekly and totaled:

2001 20.9 million
2002 20.9 million
2003 20.8 million
2004 17.7 million
2005 17.7 million
2006 16.2 million
2007 16.7 million
2008 21.6 million
2009 29.5 million
2010 23.7 million
2011 21.7 million
2012 19.4 million.

George W. Bush, first term average = 20.1 million annually (387,000 weekly)
Barack H. Obama, first term average = 23.6 million annually (454,000 weekly)

George W. Bush, second term average = 18.1 million annually (348,000 weekly)
Barack H. Obama, second term average = ? (at 375,000 weekly for the first 15 weeks of 2013, that's an annual rate of 19.5 million to date)

George W. Bush, total average over both terms = 19.1 million annually (367,000 weekly)

The Millions Who Lost Their Jobs, 2006-2012

What follows are first time claims for unemployment compensation, not-seasonally-adjusted, by year from 2006 through 2012, using Department of Labor figures, here, rounded to the nearest thousand weekly and totaled:

2006 16.2 million

2007 16.7 million

2008 21.6 million

2009 29.5 million

2010 23.7 million

2011 21.7 million

2012 19.4 million.

236K New Jobs Last Month, Or 100K?

The government report that 236,000 jobs were added last month comes from a long controversial model. An actual private count, as reported here, has a number nearly 58% lower than that:

For all the optimism of the government's report Friday, there were other weaknesses in the data.

More than 100,000 of the new positions came through the Labor Department's Birth/Death Model, which approximates the number of positions created through new business creation and failure.

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, also from the government, showed a net of 145,000 new positions filled, which is at or just below the level associated with bringing down the unemployment rate.

Market research firm TrimTabs said its independent count, which relies on income tax withholdings, showed just 100,000 new jobs.

"The U.S. economy is not as strong as the conventional wisdom believes." said TrimTabs CEO David Santschi.

Number Of Job Openings Declines

From CNN Money:

The number of job openings fell in April, the Labor Department reported Tuesday, another sign of weakness in the U.S. labor market.

The report showed 3.4 million open positions for the month, down 8.7% from the 3.7 million openings in March.

The drop in available jobs means there are 3.7 unemployed job seekers for each opening, up from 3.4 in March, meaning there is greater competition for the available jobs.

While that's a big improvement from the record high of 6.7 unemployed people for each opening in July 2009, it's far worse than the 1.6 unemployed per opening in November 2007, the month before the recession began.

Read the whole thing here.

Male Unemployment is 11.2 Million, Not 4.2 Million

So says Brett Arends, here:

Millions here are still out of work. The unemployment situation is far, far worse than the government is telling you. Forget the official jobless rate, 9%. It’s meaningless. Even the so-called “underemployment” rate doesn’t tell the full story. Consider this: According to the Labor Department, the number of men age 25 to 54 who are out of work is officially 4.2 million. The reality? Deep in the footnotes the Labor Department says there are 61.6 million men in America age 25 to 54, while just 46.7 million are in full-time work. That leaves 14.9 million left over. Another 3.7 million work part-time. Seven million aren’t accounted for at all.

Obama vs. Bush: Initial Claims for Unemployment Compared

Hundreds of thousands of people lose a job every week, year in and year out, and file a first-time claim for unemployment benefits. The federal government keeps track of that information and reports it weekly, here. You can examine it for yourself by following the link at the bottom of that page at the US Department of Labor.

What follows is the Obama record of such claims (150 weeks so far-November 2008 to present) compared with the Bush record (417 weeks-November 2000 through October 2008), showing the seasonally adjusted number of weeks in which 200,000 or more filed a claim for first time benefits, 300,000 or more, and so on up through 600,000 or more.

Generally speaking, first time claims in the 300,000s is consistent with an economy where people lose a job and find a new one within the usual period of benefits, which customarily has been limited to 26 weeks (6 months). Hence the usual advice of financial advisers to save money equivalent to 6 months' expenses. At the same time, net new workers enter the workforce as the population grows in size, and they also find work under those conditions.

200,000+ (Obama: 0 weeks; Bush: 14 weeks) -- longest consecutive streak: Bush with 7

300,000+ (Obama: 8 weeks; Bush: 304 weeks) -- longest consecutive streaks: Bush with 104, 61, 30, 24

400,000+ (Obama: 86 weeks; Bush: 98 weeks) -- longest consecutive streaks: Obama with 52, Bush 23

500,000+ (Obama: 35 weeks; Bush: 1 week) -- longest consecutive streak: Obama with 20

600,000+ (Obama: 21 weeks; Bush: 0 weeks) -- longest consecutive streak: Obama with 18

Unless initial claims soon recede below 400,000 per week and stay there, Obama will easily beat Bush's two term record of first time claims at the 400,000+ level in just one term. And so far, 60 percent of Obama's time in office has been spent with unemployment at catastrophically high levels week after week, whereas under Bush it was just 6 percent of the time.