Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Day 66 jobs update

June 8th was the Obama proclamation of 600,000 new jobs this summer over 100 days.We are now 2/3 of the way thru.Do you see 396,000 new jobs created since then?Of course you don't because he meant that he had saved them,not created them.

Instead,we lost 247,000 more jobs in July.We were told that this is good news because the official rate dropped from 9.5% to 9.4%.My previous post discusses why this is a fallacy.

Let's not forget that unemployment benefits have been extended twice and are awaiting a 3rd extension.If it doesn't happen 500,000 more people will drop off the rolls as the first wave of extensions expires in September.It will be 1.5 million more by the end of the year as the second wave expires.

We must pay attention to this closely as it will skew the numbers.422,000 dropped off in July for various reasons but regardless are not counted.So pay attention to the actual number EMPLOYED,not unemployed.This number showed a 155,000 drop from June which makes the drop in the official rate meaningless.Obama does not want the official unemployment number to top 10% as this is a symbolic threshold,unless he needs the fear factor for another stimulus or TARP expansion.It doesn't seem likely he would go this route as he has proclaimed the economy his now,so another dip would be blamed on his policies.But only he knows the master plan,we can all only speculate.More to come...

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