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April Jobs Report: 211,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 4.4 Percent (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: The U.S. economy added 211,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Both the unemployment rate, at 4.4 percent, and the number of unemployed persons, at 7.1 million, saw only incremental changes in April. The new data follow disappointing results from March, when the Labor Department initially said less than 100,000 jobs were created. In April, some of the biggest job gains came in leisure and hospitality, health care and social assistance, financial activities, and mining, the agency says.
So, the unemployment news is "nothing particularly exceptional happened in the jobs and unemployment statistics this month, according to the Labor department".
What about the 92 million unemployed Americans who are waiting for new coal mining jobs?
https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...
Yes, unemployment is open to interpretation and yes, there are different ways of presenting the data. The "usual" figure is U4, but for others U6 might be more meaningful. I think U6 is probably a better estimate, but that's just my opinion. What ISN'T my opinion is that no matter what number you use, unemployment is creeping downwards.
U3 numbers are complete bullshit. Everybody who is paying even the slightest attention knows they are complete bullshit. They are so full of bullshit that they're not even useful for comparative / trending purposes. They have literally only two forms of utility: political propaganda, and targets of mockery. It doesn't matter if it's a Democratic administration or a Republican administration. Even U6 is extremely sketchy: surveys multiplied by guesswork.
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So happy to see these numbers. President Trump is a truly worthy successor to Lincoln and Reagan. Keep up the good work, sir!
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We really need to stop with this U3 garbage. It is a meaningless number. It was contrived for the sole purpose of LYING to the American People about the health of the economy. Here are some economical chickens that Trump is going to bring home to roost:
#1 It is being projected that there will be more than 8,000 retail store closings in the United States in 2017, and that will far surpass the former peak of 6,163 store closings that we witnessed in 2008.
#2 The number of retailers that have filed for bankruptcy so far in 2017 has already surpassed the total for the entire year of 2016.
#3 So far in 2017, an astounding 49 million square feet of retail space has closed down in the United States. At this pace, approximately 147 million square feet will be shut down by the end of the year, and that would absolutely shatter the all-time record of 115 million square feet that was shut down in 2001.
#4 The Atlanta Fedâ(TM)s GDP Now model is projecting that U.S. economic growth for the first quarter of 2017 will come in at just 0.5 percent. If that pace continues for the rest of the year, it will be the worst year for U.S. economic growth since the last recession.
#5 Restaurants are experiencing their toughest stretch since the last recession, and in March things continued to get even worse: Foot traffic at chain restaurants in March dropped 3.4% from a year ago. Menu prices couldn't be increased enough to make up for it, and same-store sales fell 1.1%. The least bad region was the Western US, where sales inched up 1.2% year-over-year and traffic fell only 1.7%, according to TDn2K's Restaurant Industry Snapshot. The worst was the NY-NJ Region, where sales plunged 4.6% and foot traffic 6.3%.
This comes after a dismal February, when foot traffic had dropped 5% year-over-year, and same-store sales 3.7%.
#6 In March, U.S. factory output declined at the fastest pace in more than two years.
#7 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, not a single person is employed in nearly one out of every five U.S. families.
#8 U.S. government revenues just suffered their biggest drop since the last recession.
#9 Nearly all of the big automakers reported disappointing sales in March, and dealer inventories have now risen to the highest level that we have seen since the last recession.
#10 Used vehicle prices are absolutely crashing, and subprime auto loan losses have shot up to the highest level that we have seen since the last recession.
#11 At this point, most U.S. consumers are completely tapped out. According to CNN, almost six out of every ten Americans do not have enough money saved to even cover a $500 emergency expense.
The US Economy is NOT ok
Too many people work without paying taxes, therefore count as unemployed or they are too comfortable living with mommy, daddy or sugar daddy.
You got too many alternative facts mixed up in that statement. Just focus on one. No need to do three at a time.
is Obama got the blame for post-Bush recession (which to be fair was caused by deregulation started by Clinton) and now Trump gets the credit for Obama's work fixing things.
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U-6 is not "the true unemployment"; it's a measure including people who are underemployed, who are unable to get jobs because of their economic situation (e.g. single mothers who couldn't take a job if you begged them, because they can't afford daycare and you're not willing to pay enough), and so forth.
Each unemployment measure has its uses. We're used to U-3 largely because it tells us how much competition is out there for a job of any sort; U-4 tells you how many people are out there actually unemployed, though. Underemployment (included in U-6) is another important statistic nobody looks at. The U-5 addition (people who can't take a job even if offered one, but wish they could) is fairly-unimportant in terms of unemployment measures.
U-6 still doesn't tell you about a few interesting things, like how much employment is actually available versus your participating labor force. Unemployment includes the people in U-5 because those people are interested in working, thus are part of the participating labor force. Because of that, U-6 plus employed persons equates to all participating labor force. Thing is, U-6 includes underemployment; that doesn't tell you about whole jobs.
If you have three underemployed working 20, 15, and 23 hours per week, you have 58 hours or 1.45 whole jobs between three people. A measure of whole jobs is useful; also useful is a measure of whole jobs counting part-time employment of people who want to be part-time employed as "whole jobs" (that is: if a working spouse has a 12-hour weekend job, that's a whole job because said person neither needs nor desires 40 hours of employment).
So that gives you three whole-employment indicators we don't track: WE-1 (number of whole jobs, including all full-time workers plus the fraction of full-time hours worked by hourly-paid part-time workers); WE-2 (WE-1, plus part-time workers not seeking full-time jobs are counted as whole jobs instead of partial jobs); and WE-3 (WE-2, plus full-time workers and workers with multiple jobs exceeding full-time hours have their total hours counted and fractioned, such that a person working 60 hours per week counts as 1.5 whole jobs).
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I didn't realize cloning has become so effective....
Now the only question is can we make enough black turtlenecks to keep up with demand?
'As new discouraged workers move regularly from U.3 into U.6 unemployment accounting, those who have been “discouraged” for one year also are dropped from the U.6 measure'.
http://www.shadowstats.com/art...
So there are many people out there who are not counted, even in U.6.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Creating 200k jobs is easy. Destroy 100k jobs that can actually sustain a family and create two separate jobs that can't. Presto job creation. Now pit the people who need those pittance jobs to make ends meet against each other and watch the race to the bottom unfold.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's the lowest unemployment rate since before the Great Recession. That's pretty exceptional in my book.
That might be exceptional, but it isn't true. It is the lowest level in a decade. Here's a graph of the unemployment rate since the 1960s:
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/560e8af3ecad046c04212250-1200-900/sept-2015-unemployment-rate.png
where you can see the rate dropped below 4.4% many times.
Here's a graph (from six months ago) looking just at the last 15 years:
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/560e8af3ecad046c04212250-1200-900/sept-2015-unemployment-rate.png
and you can see the rate was below 4.4% right until the 2008 economic crash hit. You can also see that 4.4% is nothing exceptional, simply the continuation of the trend.
I wasn't a big Trump supporter, but you have to admit the guy is coming thorough 'bigly.'
Since he's only been in office a hundred days, it's unlikely that any economic effects of his presidency have hit yet. From the graph, I'd say that this unemployment news is "more of the same, nothing exceptional."