Karl Denninger on Employment: Recovery My Ass

02-04-2011 • Market-ticker.org

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. 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. Change in Private Payrolls (Jan) M/M 50K vs. Exp. 145K (Prev. 113K) Change in Manufacturing Payrolls (Jan) M/M 49K vs. Exp. 10K (Prev. 10K) Seasonally adjusted U-6 underemployment 16.1% from 16.6% previously Much more importantly, Not-seasonally adjusted U-6 surged from 16.6% to 17.3%! The civilian labor force declined from 153,690 to 153,186 Government workers: from 20,759K to 20,740K Labor force participation at 64.2%, the lowest since March March 1984 Part-time workers for economic reasons: 8,407 Part-time workers for non-economic reasons: 17,552 Birth/Death adjustment: -339,000