What always troubles me is that you have to swim against the 'zeitgeist rip' in order to find any opinion in the meeja versus these numbers being "good". 70% of the US economy relies on consumer spending and if you ain't working you ain't spending...much. 34 million Americans receive "food stamps", 34 million...
I'm sure our US cousins can shed more light on how unemployment works in the US but what has occured over the past 12 months is a tacit acceptance by the US admin that the States has a huge permanently unemployable problem. What these latest figures do not illustrate is the amount of unemployed folk that have simply given up and will not be entitled to anything. The largest economy on the planet has lost close on 8 million jobs inside the past 18 months and folks' hours have been reduced to an average 33 from 39-40 in order to keep them in work....it's so FUBAR and yet the denial is palpable. I swear most folk you meet in the UK really think
IT is all over, and why not given the constant diet of denial fed by the moguls, or govt. controlled media suspect outlets...
Here's one dissenting voice amongst the 88 news results (so far) on Google news that view it as positive...
For good news about jobs, you need to look elsewhere in Friday's numbers.
DAYTON, Ohio -- On Friday, the unemployment rate shrank for the first time in over a year, down modestly to 9.4% from 9.5%.
That's the bad news. It sank only because people gave up on the job market at an even faster rate than jobs were lost. Beneath the headline number, most strikingly, 247,000 jobs were still lost in July and the 9.4% figure does not represent an improving job market at all.
Psychologically, it's a big deal, another sign that the worst has passed. Much of economics is about confidence and psychology, so there's some reason to see the report as positive. Economists had expected the rate to increase to 9.6%. A miss of 0.2% is not that wide, but it seems everyone had just forgotten that even with a general downward trend, it's possible to have a positive number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics was careful not to overplay it, noting merely that the unemployment rate was "little changed for the second consecutive month."
Most importantly, the unemployment rate fell because of a statistical quirk: 247,000 jobs were lost, but an even greater number of people left the "labor force" using the government definitions. Since unemployment only measures the "labor force," a shrinking force perversely produces a positive number. A shrinking labor force is not a positive, especially since, as noted by Millan Mulraine, an economist with TD Securities, it shrank because discouraged unemployed workers appeared to have left in droves in July.
Even worse, the Economic Policy Institute highlights that the number of workers who have been unemployed for over six months increased by 584,000 to 5 million.
So, 584,000 people fall into long-term unemployment. For regular unemployment, 247,000 jobs were lost and 422,000 people left the labor force altogether, but since the latter number is larger, the rate "improves." That's why the 9.4% rate is the bad news.
Bad News: Unemployment Falls To 9.4% - Forbes.com
