FedUpUSA

From the Bureau of Lies and Scams (BLS):

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 244,000 in April, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.0 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in several service providing industries, manufacturing, and mining.

That sounds good.  The unemployment rate edged up as allegedly more people came back into the workforce:

Oh, and they revised last month up by 41,000 jobs too.

So what’s going on with the household data?

The rate of change remains positive – but annualized (that is, removing seasonal variations) it is flagging, although remaining in positive territory.

The claim in the mainstream media is that “more people are re-entering the workforce and looking for work.”  Really?  When why is the “Not In Labor Force” number rising?

and why is the rate (not-in-labor force number as compared against population) flat and not falling?

The employment rate of the population is showing the same seasonal bounce we had last year but nothing more – it’s bouncing along the bottom:

And finally, no, employment in terms of population is not improving.  Here it is folks, and that indicator has now turned down once again.  This indicator, I remind you, is the one that matters in terms of the government being able to actually fund operations via tax collection.  This indicator must be positive in order for government funding capacity to improve.

Enjoy the rally today on the hype – and false hope.

The Market-Ticker

There’s nothing like a revision to turn an increase into a decrease….

In the week ending March 26, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 388,000, a decrease of 6,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 394,000. The 4-week moving average was 394,250, a increase of 3,250 from the previous week’s revised average of 391,000.

Except last week they said….

In the week ending March 19, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 382,000, a decrease of 5,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 387,000. The 4-week moving average was 385,250, a decrease of 1,500 from the previous week’s revised average of 386,750.

Got that?  They adjusted the previous week’s claims number up 12,000 and then claim that a 6,000 decrease from the revised number is a falling number.  No, it’s a 6,000 claim increase.

See how they lie?

The “big table” doesn’t tell us much – it’s basically flat for the week of the 12th.

Nothing in here changes my view on the number tomorrow – +150k with a 50k error bound, but as is always the case I care nothing for the “headline” machined number from the Bureau of Lies and Slander (BLS); the important data, which I will analyze as I always do, is found in the household tables where they actually count people instead of “massaging” the figures to suit whatever they desire – and think they can get away with.

The Market-Ticker

Hmmm….

In the week ending Feb. 5, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 383,000, a decrease of 36,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 419,000. The 4-week moving average was 415,500, a decrease of 16,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 431,500.

Ok, that’s positive.  But the last two weeks have seen the seasonally-adjusted and non-adjusted figures very close.  This week?  Uhhh….

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 438,548 in the week ending Feb. 5, a decrease of 25,928 from the previous week. There were 507,634 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

Well well…. more than 55,000 people were magically subtracted due to alleged seasonal factors.

Hmmmm….

Well, we got a few things here.  First, we now have a clean understanding of the crap number in the employment report, as there’s really no ”there” there.  Second, I don’t believe the seasonally-adjusted numbers.

The market doesn’t believe it either, judging from the futures reaction.

The Market-Ticker

Wow…. if you remember on the ADP and Claims numbers, I said I was expecting +100k.

That was way off – we really got +36k.

The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 9.0 percent in January, while nonfarm payroll employment changed little (+36,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in manufacturing and in retail trade but was down in construction and in transportation and warehousing. Employment in most other major industries changed little over the month.

Youch.

There’s no love in here.  Worse, the benchmark revisions are out, and they show about 300,000 supposedly-reported jobs that didn’t really happen.  No, really?  How come that number seems to always be in this direction?  That is, why is it that the BLS always seems to over-report reality in the establishment survey?

That inconvenient truth, incidentally, is why I always use the household numbers.  They’re at least a real survey without BS “adjustments” applied and while they’re subject to sampling error at least they’re not intentionally distorted. 

This officially sucks.

On a month-by-month basis the number of actual employed people dropped by more than 1.5 million!  That’s a huge decrease and what’s worse, the trend is awful, being unbroken now since the first of last year.

Remember, we need about +150,000 in actual employment just to keep up with new entrants into the workforce.  We instead lost ten times that number of actual employed.

The monthly numbers are noisy in this regard, but there’s simply no way to argue “strength” in these numbers, irrespective of how much cheerleading you’d like to do.

Not-in-labor force numbers are still rising, but the annualized change is now negative.  That’s a positive.  Mildly.  Unfortunately it’s not turning into actual jobs, it’s turning into people looking for work and not finding it. 

The employment rate posted a new low for the recessionary period – 57.6%, falling below the 57.8% registered in January of 2010. 

There has been no improvement – at all – in the employment picture, and in fact the employed rate, as a percentage of the non-institutionalized population, is now the worst it has been since the economic downturn began.

Recovery my ass.

The Market-Ticker

A few more charts, courtesty of Calculated Risk

Percent Job Losses During Recessions

Part Time for Economic Reasons

Unemployed Over 26 Weeks

Yup.  Lies, lies and more damn lies.

UPDATE:  Rick Santelli of CNBC had a few choice words to add about the Employment Report:

Santelli continued to criticize the spin: “You know what Steve? You and I both know that the unemployment rate, the labor force moving in and out, those giving up, is really probably your best statistical reason for the drop to 9.0 (percent). And in terms of jobs, you, Mr. Steve Liesman, said if you work just one day. If you stay home but you get paid you’re counted in the data …”

SnowJob: Revising the Non-Farm Payrolls Report

It appears as though the concerns expressed by the Administration about the snow storms and their impact on lost employment was overdone, if not misplaced. The market is pleasantly surprised with this -36,000 jobs number, since the expectations had been calibrated lower so effectively.

In fairness to the Obama Administration, they are only doing what Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I* had been doing right along with almost every statistic that they have issued. It’s called ‘perception management.’ Greece used one method of accounting management in shaping the numbers, and the US uses its own approach to what is essentially a similar problem.

“Propaganda proceeds by psychological manipulations, character modifications, and the creation of stereotypes useful when the time comes.
The two great routes that propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth.” Jacques Ellul

In addition to the ‘better-than-expected’ jobs loss announced today for February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also went back and adjusted the employment numbers from April-July 2009.

“With the release of February data on March 5, 2010, BLS has corrected April-July 2009 establishment survey estimates for all employees and women employees for the federal government series. The changes result from corrections to initial counts for Census temporary and intermittent workers for Census 2010.”

This adjustment itself was not so great, certainly not as significant as the benchmark revision done in January for the 12+ months preceding.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to compare the views of the US employment Seasonally Adjusted “headline numbers” presented by the BLS in December 2009, and the current view that they are showing as the true number today after the two recent sets of revisions.

The net result of the revisions is that jobs were added to the beginning and the end of what will be defined as ‘the recession.’

This serves to now make the slump look steeper and more severe, and the recovery to be a little sharper, with plenty of jobs leftover to create a ‘flat impression’ in 2010 at worst.

In short, jobs were removed from almost every month in the revision during the slump, and shoved into the beginning and into the end.

That looks like a nice picture of a recovery, doesn’t it? See, the February 2009 stimulus program and the strategy of massive bank bailouts have worked.

I have seen corporate managers who have come into a new position and inherited a mess jigger the numbers in a similar way. You make the slump look as bad as possible, and shove the excess profits or revenue into the beginning and the end of the problem, to make your efforts look as heroically effective as is possible.

Perhaps this is all just the way things turned out, in revising the numbers so as to make them the most accurate.

Or perhaps the US economy and its monetary system are an increasingly untenable Ponzi scheme, the mother of frauds.

If you remember just a short while ago I reported on what certainly appears to be a very clumsy scam pulled by the BLS in their so-called “inflation” reading published on the 19th of February – where the numbers they presented simply didn’t add up, and as a consequence put forward a false CPI, or inflation number.

Curiously, we haven’t heard anything from the BLS on this “error”.

This, of course, is only an “error” in that it is not the actual means by which the BLS is “supposed” to report “inflation.”

But the BLS has twice in the last 30 years revised their methodology, both times with the intent of understating “inflation.”

Why?  Well, a big part of the reason is that the law says that various benefit programs are supposed to be indexed to inflation.  By intentionally understating inflation Senior Citizens and others on various fixed-income entitlement programs funded by government get intentionally screwed.

The Senate yesterday rejected a $250 one-time check to Seniors and others who have been so-screwed for the last two decades:

President Barack Obama has called for Congress to approve the payments to make up for their benefits not increasing this year, but the Senate defeated it 50 to 47.

….

Social Security payments for the elderly and disabled will stay flat this year for the first time since 1975 because they are tied to consumer prices, which decreased amid the worst economic recession in 70 years.

Of course the real problem doesn’t lie here.  As is usually the case the media won’t talk about the fact that the current inflation rate, if measured under the “old” methodology, never went anywhere near zero.

How much does this “count”?  Tremendously so.  Over a ten year time frame understating inflation by 7% results in your Social Security payments being half of what they would otherwise be.  If the understatement is by just 3% you get a 35% underpayment at the end of a ten year period.

Of course what the media reports is the “one time” payment was rejected, but what they don’t report is that seniors have been screwed for three decades by intentional book-cooking in the government.

And by the way – no, there is no possibility of the government “fixing this” and paying what the law says they should.  The money doesn’t exist.

But this scam, along with dozens of others, is how our fabulous government managed to run its Ponzi Scheme for as long as it has – a Ponzi that is now collapsing, irrespective of what you’re being told by the vacuous bobbing heads on national television.

If you’re a senior and been paying “membership dues” to AARP, you might want to ask them why their much-vaunted “lobbying” and “public education” campaigns haven’t focused on this for the previous 20 years – and why they sold you down the river.

Hope you like your kids (and they like you) Seniors, because the government tit is rapidly running dry.