Friday, October 7, 2011

More Keynesian Konfusion: Payroll Employment Up More Than Expected

Nonfarm payroll employment edged up by 103,000 in September, and the unemployment
rate held at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. (Part of the gain reflected the return to payrolls of about 45,000 telecommunications workers who had been on strike in August). Further, the change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised from +85,000 to +127,000, and the change for August was revised from 0 to +57,000.

In September, job gains occurred in professional and business services, health care, and construction. Government employment continued to trend down. The U.S.
Postal Service continued to lose jobs (-5,000). Local government employment declined
by 35,000 and has fallen by 535,000 since September 2008.

As for the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (8.8 percent),
adult women (8.1 percent), teenagers (24.6 percent), whites (8.0 percent), blacks
(16.0 percent), and Hispanics (11.3 percent) showed little or no change in September.

As for Keynesian econometric trend followers, CNBC has the details:

The US jobs picture beat tepid expectations, with the economy creating a significantly better than expected 103,000 new jobs in September...Economists had been looking for 60,000 total new nonfarm jobs.
Bottom line: Keynesians are clueless. The private sector continues to improve because of Bernanke money printing and the shrinkage is now pretty much at the local government level, as a result of declining tax revenues (which will also reverse itself in coming months). There is no double dip. The stock market and economy will soon go into a Fed manipulated boom, that will have Keynesians scratching their heads even more.

5 comments:

  1. Something tells me that the whole "we're headed for a double-dip recession" thing is just a cooling down. They know that inflation is increasing, that payrolls are rising and that certain sectors are seeing bubble-type indications. All of this talk is a weak attempt to slow down a dramatically increasing M2 (thanks to the increases in MB over the past few years), as well as to get certain policies/regs passed through the Congress.

    Incompetent, insane, illogical, misguided, etc, these are all traits that I can attribute to the PTB. They certainly aren't stupid.... Well, not all of them, anyhow. Certainly, the current policy recommendations of going on a printing spree from the MMs (modern monetarist) and MMTers (modern monetary theory) camps are ludicrous, but I don't think that they have the reins of this horse just yet (thank goodness).

    Bottom line: The Fed knows that it screwed up, that it created a metric F-ton of base money, and that eventually that money would get out and multiply deposits. They always said that they had an exit strategy. The problem as I see it is that this is their exit strategy: enact operation "Twist" to attempt to cool down M2 and tell everybody that a double-dip is coming. Why else would they downplay current nominal growth?

    I don't know, maybe I am looking at this all wrong, but that is what it looks like to me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Initial jobless claims rose back up to over 400,000 this week, after dipping under 400,000 last week.

    Non-farm payrolls rose in September because more people stopped looking for a job.

    Bottom line: Keynesians are clueless. The private sector continues to improve because of Bernanke money printing and the shrinkage is now pretty much at the local government level, as a result of declining tax revenues (which will also reverse itself in coming months). There is no double dip. The stock market and economy will soon go into a Fed manipulated boom, that will have Keynesians scratching their heads even more.

    I'm no Keynesian, but I'll take that bet.

    Sometimes I wonder if your LOOKING for data that confirms your expectations regarding the money printing.

    Isn't it possible for NGDP to go up, for M3 to go up, and yet the economy deteriorates? What if fiat money credit expansion is at its last throes and cannot reinflate any more booms because the economy's structure is just so distorted that more credit is simply incapable of distorting (i.e. growing) the economy even more?

    ReplyDelete
  3. The reason why I ask the above is because the US economy is such a sinkhole that it needs to generate 261,200 jobs per month, every month, to the end of Obama's second term, in order to return to pre-depression level employment.

    Is it possible that the recent employment blips you have been observing are just the muscle spasms of dead frogs in high school science labs?

    ReplyDelete
  4. And if there is a boom, Mr. Obama will credit the policies and agenda of his administration and probably capture a second term.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Why is it that the BLS reports the employment numbers?? Shouldn't the Treasury report the numbers. They would, most certainly, have all the data required to be far more accurate than BLS. These numbers are hooey.

    ReplyDelete