The Phony Recovery...

Whenever a politician tells you that our economy is recovering, remember this graph.  We won't have a real recovery until the employment-population ratio gets back up above 61% or so.  Any politician who tells you otherwise is lying.  Or as Mark Twain would say, they're opening their mouth (as the only thing likely to emerge is a lie)...

Worst Recession Ever...Gets Even Worse...

I've posted this chart before; this is just another in a series of updates to it.  It gets more terrifying the more time goes by...

Scary Graph... ?

The graph at right shows the ratio of civilian employment to total population, over time.  You can see that in the current recession this ratio fell faster and further than in any other recession since 1948.  Bad, right?

Not so fast.  There are two classic games being played here.

First, why did the author of this graph pick 1948 as the starting point?  This leaves out the Great Depression, which would have looked pretty bad on here.

Second, note the vertical scale: it's not zero-based.  Rather, it shows only numbers between 54 and 65 percent, in effect greatly magnifying the vertical scale. 

I don't have the raw data, so I can't re-graph it for you.  But trust me...this is a very misleading graph.  The current recession is bad, no doubt about it – but it is not quite the calamity implied by this “cleverly” drawn graph...

Depressing Chart of the Day...

Much more here.

Scary Chart...

I've published this chart before; but it was time for an update.  The basic message here is that we're in the mother of all recessions, no matter what kind of blather you're hearing from politicians, economists, or “settled science”.  Read it and be afraid, especially of that almost-flat bottom.  Where's the steep upturn that we see in nearly all the other recessions?  It ain't here yet, that's for sure...

Depressing Video of the Day...

Here's a movie showing the unemployment rate (as reported by the government) by county, over the period starting just before the current recession up to today.  I recommend having a good dose of alcohol nearby before viewing...

Scariest Chart Gets Scarier...

I've posted this chart several times before.  Now that the census jobs have all basically disappeared, you can see that (measured by job loss) this recession is muddling along at the bottom with no obvious recovery in progress.

Trillions of dollars stolen from the tax payers of future generations (to pay back the loans), and absolutely nothing to show for it.  That's your government at work, folks.  Somebody is getting rich on our backs, and it ain't me.

Are you pissed off yet?  Remember this in November.  I'm gonna vote for anyone who supports radical reforms, especially radical reductions in government spending...

Sobering CBO Report...

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a sobering report titled Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis (PDF).  The graph at right is taken from that report.  So is this warning:

Further increases in federal debt relative to the nation’s output (gross domestic product, or GDP) almost certainly lie ahead if current policies remain in place. The aging of the population and rising costs for health care will push federal spending, measured as a percentage of GDP, well above the levels experienced in recent decades. Unless policymakers restrain the growth of spending, increase revenues significantly as a share of GDP, or adopt some combination of those two approaches, growing budget deficits will cause debt to rise to unsupportable levels.

I recommend reading the entire report. It's only a few pages long, and is written for laymen.  It took me quite aback to see the CBO is looking at the experiences of Argentina, Greece, and Ireland (countries that had or have comparable debt loads) to forecast what's going to happen to us.

Basically the advice in the report boils down to this: Stop spending so damned much borrowed money!  Quickly!

Another View of the Manipulated Jobless Number...

This time from the WSJ.  There's a lot of interesting material at the link, but to my point in a previous post:

If people without jobs become discouraged and stop seeking work, the unemployment rate will decline (other things being equal). On the other hand, if people become hopeful about future employment, job seeking will go up—as will the unemployment rate.

This way of measuring job availability is clearly flawed. One simple alternative would be to measure the labor force as the number of people with jobs. Unemployment would be determined based on increases or decreases in the number of people employed relative to historic job growth.

Sounds right to me...

Most Terrifying Unemployment Graph?

Via The Atlantic.  Someone at the Department of Labor is probably going to have a stern talking-to over this.  Why?  Because it exposes the ongoing lie in the published unemployment percentages.  The Bureau of Labor has been publishing unemployment percentages this year that range from almost 11% to just over 9% – but the only reason those numbers are so low is because the Bureau rather arbitrarily removes millions of people from the unemployed category by saying that they've given up looking for work (and somehow, magically, that means they're no longer unemployed – only a bureaucrat could think that made sense!).  How do people get classified as having given up?  The biggest factor: how long they've been unemployed!

The real unemployment number is somewhere around 15% to 18% (the Bureau doesn't release enough data to compute it precisely, or at least I couldn't find that data).  There are a lot of people who have been out of work for over six months now...

Uh Oh...

Every morning I glance at this graph (Google's unemployment index).  It's updated roughly weekly.  This morning it spiked to nearly double what it was just a few weeks ago.  For whatever reason, lots more people are googling for unemployment-related terms.  It's hard to see how this could be good.  The fear, of course, is that the much-feared “double-dip” recession is upon us.  I sure hope not...

The Real “Great Depression”...

The press of late has taken to calling our current recession “The Great Depression”.  Accepting this characterization requires either a breathtaking ignorance of history or a complete disregard for the objective truth.  Either way, not a vote of confidence in our lamestream media.

The photo at right is one of many iconic photos of impoverished Americans in the 1930s.  My own father remembers those years – just 70 years ago, a mere blink ago in the historical record.  In that Great Depression, millions of Americans were under existential threat – lacking such basics as food and shelter.  The recent history of the area where I live (Southern California) was greatly affected by the mass migration of the “Okies” from the dustbowl of Texas and Oklahoma.

In today's press-styled “Great Depression”, nothing even remotely comparable is taking place.  Our lamestream media is doing the nation a great disservice by pretending otherwise.  But then there's nothing new about the lamestream media doing the nation a disservice, is there?

Unemployment Index...

This is today's Unemployment Index (of unemployment-related Google searches).  The big dip from mid-April to early June has been erased; it's now back into the highest territory it's ever been in.

As I've said in earlier posts about this index, I'm not really sure what to make of it.  It is, to say the least, a very unconventional “measure” of unemployment.  It indicates something, I'm sure, but I don't know what.  For some reason, between mid-April and today, far fewer Americans were googling for information about unemployment.  Why?  What does that actually imply?  And what does the recent jump indicate?  

One thing that jumps out at me: the recent dip in this index almost exactly corresponds to the recent tip in the stock market indexes – the inverse of the relationship I'd expect.

Spike!

For the past few months, the Google unemployment index has been bouncing around the same high level.  This week it spiked upwards to set a new high (click graph to enlarge).

This index measures frequency of unemployment related Google searches, so it's an indirect measure – more a measure of interest in unemployment, rather than of unemployment itself.  But why should even that have peaked last week?

In an odd coincidence, my good friend and neighbor lost his job just over a week ago when his company filed for bankruptcy.  Maybe the spike is due to his queries?

Sober Up...

The graph at right (click to enlarge) shows the job losses over time in this recession (in red) as compared with other recessions since World War II. 

It's not a happy picture.  By extrapolation, we haven't hit the job-loss bottom of this recession yet.  Other indicators are improving, but for many people job losses are what hits home the worst – and clearly we have a ways to go yet on recovery in this recession.

More here.

The Economy is So Bad That...

Via reader Jim M.:

The economy is so bad that:


I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.


I ordered a burger at McDonald's and the kid behind the counter asked,  "Can you afford fries with that?"


CEO's are now playing miniature golf.


If the bank returns your check marked  "Insufficient Funds," you call them and ask if they meant you or them.


Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.


McDonald's is selling the 1/4 ouncer.


Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their children's names.


A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico .


Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.


Motel Six won't leave the light on anymore.


The Mafia is laying off judges.


Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.


Congress says they are looking into this Bernard Madoff scandal. Oh Great!!   The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!


And, finally...


I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc.,  I called the Suicide Lifeline. I got a call center in Pakistan, and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck.

Unemployment Index...

Google's index of unemployment-related searches just took a nosedive, falling from the highest levels of the year to the lowest levels in the span of a couple of weeks. I have no idea what would account for this, nor do I have any idea whether we should think of this as an optimistic omen. It will be interesting to watch this over the next few weeks to see if this was a leading indicator of something we'll see later in government statistics...

Unemployment Index...

The chart to the right (click to enlarge) is today's Google Unemployment Index, since 1/1/08.  It just reached an all-time high, which corresponds roughly with the recently announced high in the government's unemployment index (10.2%).

This is a tally of queries for subjects related to unemployment.  More importantly, it is unfiltered and unvarnished, unlike the government's figures. 

No good news for job seekers yet...

Yikes!

Absolutely fascinating animated visualization of job losses and gains over the past 5 years or so.  The end of this animation is enough to make your hair stand on end (if, unlike me, you have much of that commodity left)...

Scott Adams Strikes Again...

I am in complete awe of Scott Adams' ability to find humor in the current business (and technology) world.  As a former (and recovering) manager and executive, I've been on all sides of this issue.  I was CEO of an enterprise software company when the “dot-com bubble” burst, and how to present the issue to employees was one of the many issues we wrestled with.

My favorite frame is the next-to-last one.  Getting middle-level managers to agree on which employees would be laid off in a downsizing was agonizingly difficult, and almost always required me to decide for many of them.  Scott Adams' solution to this challenge seems very attractive in the abstract...