BLS : Unemployment is 17.1%
October 8, 2010
In the official U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics the Unemployment rate in the United States is 17.1% via the U-6 ranking.
The U-6 is defined as Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.
IE: The people where their unemployment ran out or lawyers serving hamburgers part time at $7.25 an hour at McDonald’s are counted in the U-6.
17.1% of the workforce is either unemployed or employed part time when they need a full time job to pay their bills.
This unemployment rate is a record. It’s a terrible figure.
This means that when you walk on the street, of the available workforce (IE: not retired, not minors, not disabled) nearly 20% of them have either no job or a job that severely underpays what their skillset would normally pay.
Welcome to the new reality people, where the chances are we will be seeing this near 20% unemployment for sometime. Last time we reached this level of unemployment we had to enter a major world war to get us out of it.
Terrible precedent.
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Republicans tell 1.3 Million Americans to F-Off
July 2, 2010
House Passes Bill, But Senate Republican Filibuster to Pass Extension Bill Holds 1.3 Million Americans to Lose Benefits.
This is complete garbage. The primary reason is that this will “bring down the unemployment rate”,
as noted earlier once someone loses their unemployment check, unemployed people are technically not unemployed as per the “official” U-3 measure.
This will shave off a full percentage point, if not more, from the unemployment rate. The BLS then can claim these people are not in the labor pool. In other words they have no job, but they are not unemployed.
Enjoy the new reality.
This isn’t job creation, this is a disaster in the making. Once the government starts fudging numbers to this level is the exact moment you have to think we are in far worse shape than what is being reported.
Most likely the true unemployment rate is near 20% . Especially when you count all the Engineers and Lawyers working at McDonalds part time.
The chances are the Republicans are doing this to make Obama look bad, because clearly he couldn’t save those people and now that’s another 1.3 million people (and their family’s and dependants) that are going to be voting for anyone but whoever is in office.
I have never seen a party work so hard to make a mess of things so they could get in power. Perhaps they should stop playing politics for once and remember that there are children that are dependent on their parents putting food on the table with that unemployment check or a mortgage to pay for a roof over those kids heads.
This is a tragic development, and honestly these Republicans in the Senate are UN-American.
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How Washington will “fix” the unemployment rate
June 30, 2010
Evidently Washington has a great way to fix the unemployment rate. It’s called fudging the numbers. The Senate rejected the unemployment extension $110 billion jobs bill would have extended benefits through the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which has allowed workers to collect for as much as 99 weeks.
The rejection of the bill places all those unemployed off the books, in essence counting them as employed, or as some people put it “not in the labor force”.
This means that large numbers of people will be forced off the unemployment benefits package and in essence will be thrown on the street. In that process what will happen is the unemployment rate will most likely drop by a full percentage point, but not because jobs were found, but rather because the BLS will stop counting the unemployed as unemployed.
It’s a hack job, and it’s another reason the U-6 must be the official unemployment rate. Fudging the numbers is not a way to fix the unemployment rate.
This is a terrible solution, horrific to say the least. Mark my words, the U-6 has the potential to reach a 20% unemployment rate within the next 7 months if unchecked by a real job creation.
/ end rant.
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Americans Drinking Their Way to Recovery
May 1, 2010
They also spent more at bars - That’s the key phrase of the most recent economic report showing GDP growth in the United States.
Consumers increased their spending at an annual rate of 3.6 percent in the first quarter. It was the strongest showing since early 2007 — before the Great Recession. And it marked a big improvement from the fourth quarter, when spending grew at a lackluster 1.6 percent pace.
Americans spent more on home furnishings and household appliances, recreational goods and vehicles and clothing. They also spent more at bars and restaurants.
Do you view this as a valid way to increase economic activity? In my humble opinion 200 unemployed people in a bar spending their unemployment debit card is not the way to recovery.
At current growth rates the city of Pottsville PA home to Yuengling brewery will be the largest most economically viable city in the next 20 years if drinking lagers is what is driving up the GDP.
This isn’t viable, it’s not sustainable. This is my opinion, but it is firmly based in fact.
Someone please think of another bubble to suck up unemployment, and if you are currently unemployed.. please go get your college diploma if you can afford it though loans. Whatever the next big thing is, you are not going to get it with an 8th grade education.
It’s ugly out there, but it is the new reality.
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It’s not unemployment - it’s structural unemployment
March 1, 2010
The US is facing not just an unemployment problem, we’re facing a structural unemployment problem. According to Wikipedia, Structural unemployment is defined by “A mismatch between the sufficiently skilled workers looking for jobs and the vacancies available. Even though the number of vacancies may be equal to the number of the unemployed, the unemployed workers lack the skills needed for the jobs — or are in the wrong part of the country or world to take the jobs offered.”
Case and point, China has a labor shortage right now, they are offering sign on bonuses for unskilled labor for the factories and construction jobs.
——————-
“Severe labor shortages in the manufacturing powerhouses of eastern China are forcing managements to boost wages and other incentives to attract and retain staff.
Fu Erjian, a job center worker in Dongguan, a major manufacturing city in Guangdong Province, said 90 percent of local companies are having difficulties recruiting workers. Hardest hit are electronics, shoes, clothing and toy manufacturers. On average firms in these sectors are 20 percent understaffed, Fu said.”
———-
There’s a reason it’s called a “Mancession” because honestly most of the obsolete jobs that were sitting around were unskilled labor, IE: construction or assembly line work that are traditionally occupied by mostly men and we can’t ship all our non-college educated men to China to fill those positions .. even though China is begging for more people to drive those forklifts.
The long term solution is to get these guys to go to school, but the trends are just the opposite. More women attend college than men do. It’s a mixture of backwards rules and laws that sort of punish men that go to school, but reward women in terms of additional financial aid. Even though as it stands now within the next few months women are set to be the majority in the workforce and for the men that are employed it’s becoming more and more common for the women to take home a greater pay.
History teaches us that having a large percentage of uneducated and unemployed men roaming the streets generally leads to bad things… very bad things.
And from there it becomes worse.
The point I am trying to make here is that our current system of punishing men that go to college is setting us all up for the world’s biggest backfire. Because as it stands now you are creating an underclass of uneducated men that within the next decade will become more and more hopeless in terms of finding a true job. You’re talking the next president is going to have to deal with a complete disaster in terms of a large roaming population of men that have no job.
To sum it up in a photo, we need more of this:
and less of this
Sure one looks like a geek, but the second one is on the unemployment line. Hence the problem.
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Paulson: 25% unemployment rate if I didn’t bailout AIG
January 27, 2010
Of course Mr. Paulson, you saved the world with the massive bailouts. We applaud you on using taxpayer money to bailout AIG. “the unemployment rate would have risen easily to 25% without the bailout.” Paulson noted to lawmakers in Washington.
So let me understand this, you’re saying you stopped the great depression because we allowed Bonus loving AIG into our pocketbooks. As compared to the great recession rate of 17.3% and climbing right to 25%. In other words I would argue that you didn’t “stop unemployment from hitting 25%” in fact what you did was draw out the recession to the point where recovery will be a decade year out rather than 3 years out.
I say Mr. Paulson that your figure is bogus, as well as the figure that unemployment right now is 10%. The only thing that appears to to follow any standard from Washington is that we can’t trust it’s figures.
Who gave this guy the power over our pocket book anyway? Oh wait.. he can’t be voted in or out by the general public.
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Unemployment U-6 is out, 17.3%
January 8, 2010
We were told “not to be surprised” if it came out at 20% about 48 hours ago, but the good news .. if you want to call it that… is that the U-6 is showing 17.3% .. an increase , but not the 2.3% increase shocker we were bracing for.
The only positive light to this is that the rate of unemployment increases is slowing down… meaning that it will at current rates eventually turn around… and start to recover from the massive damage to the economy.
Please note, when the job market starts to pick up, it’s going to be slow… really slow.
Next month or the month after it’s possible to see the U-6 show 17% instead of 17.3% .. meaning that we’re gaining jobs… but no where enough of them to cover the millions of people that are without one now.
What does this have to do with an advertising agency? Well if you haven’t noticed. Advertising is always the first to go, and the last to be hired. Meaning that in our industry we won’t see a recovery until 2011.. even if the job market is growing for the rest of the nation.
Think of it logically. A company had a rough time over the past 2 years, cut advertising, fired half their employees, and now has a capacity of only 60%. A year from now, orders start coming in, they need to hire people to fill those orders BEFORE they start allocating budgets to advertising.
This is going to be one long year for us.
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Unemployment “to exceed” 20%
January 7, 2010
Evidently there is a nasty rumour floating that the U-6 measurement from the http://www.bls.gov site will reflect a “greater than 20%” figure for the upcoming report. Currently it’s most recent report is from November 2009 and the next report isn’t due out yet, this is the one is question. We were told “don’t be shocked to see something in the 20% or greater” area.
In many industries, such as marketing and ad agency jobs the unemployment rate has already exceeded that figure.
The U-6 has been pushed more and more recently as the standard for measuring unemployment due to the number of individuals that are being dropped off the U-3 not because they found a job, but rather because they have been unemployed for such an extended period of time that their benefits have run out, hence counting them as employed, though they have no job.
In other words, the U-3 is becoming less and less accurate during the great recession.
Recently we have become more and more vocal about our opinion that the U-3 needs to be substituted with the U-6 due to this glaring error in unemployment reporting.
Hopefully this is just a rumor and unemployment hasn’t reached those figures, but looking around… I wouldn’t say this rumor is too off.
Every day images are drawing more and more parallels.
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CNBC : Tribble was right about unemployment
November 23, 2009
Evidently CNBC is coming to the same conclusion we did nearly a year ago that the U-6 is the real unemployment rate standard.
The problem is that the U-3 doesn’t count in the millions of people where their unemployment benefits have ran out, hence the U-3 is counting them as employed… even though they have no job! (go figure).
Also the U-3 doesn’t factor in the Accountant that had to take a part time job at McDonalds flipping hamburgers because he cannot find a real full time job, however the U-6 does.
Meaning that the real unemployment rate is isn’t 10.x percent, it’s actually at the great depression level of 17.5%.
We said this a year ago, CNBC is saying it now… as did one of the federal reserve heads.
In other words people, we are being had. It’s bad people, really bad. Unemployment is perhaps the biggest threat we have to an economic recovery… because let’s face it.. unemployed people don’t buy houses or cars.
Also worth noting, we don’t think this is going to recover unless we have another bubble… something that CNBC said today… and we said a year ago
From CNBC:
“”To me there’s no easy solution here,” says Michael Pento, chief economist at Delta Global Advisors. “Unless you create another bubble in which the economy can create jobs, then you’re not going to have growth. That’s the sad truth.”"
Go figure… we need another bubble people.. and the stimulus spending went into roads and bridges.. not another bubble.
Enjoy the new reality.
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BLS.GOV : Unemployment is 17%
October 21, 2009
The BLS.GOV site is reporting that the Unemployment rate has reached 17% in the US via the U-6 Standard. This standard is what was roughly used during the 1930′s, squarely placing us at 1931 in terms of the unemployment rate. By 1934 that rate jumped to a full 25%, meaning that 1 out of every 4 people was without a job, so at current job loss rates, within 900 days we will be at that 25% unemployment level. How do you market and advertise in such a recessionary environment?
We argued earlier this year that the U-6 needs to be the measure rather than the U-3, We were criticized as being off the wall, until a Federal Reserve head stated the same thing, hence validating our position that we have argued for months for.
Yes we were even called Peter Schiff (like it was an insult)
If you want to know who Peter is, here is a video dated 2006…. notice he was right then… in the middle of the housing boom and made Arthur Laffer look like an idiot within 18 months of it’s filming.
The point is that 17% is ugly, really ugly… and the chances are it will go to 20% or higher unless something stops it…. last time it was WWII … who knows what it will be this time….
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