I do not think unexpectedly means what they think it means. Because every time jobless claims rise it surprises the heck out of the media elite.
More Americans unexpectedly filed first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, indicating companies lack confidence the economic recovery will be sustained.
Initial jobless applications increased to 480,000 in the week ended Jan. 30, the most in seven weeks, from 472,000 the prior week, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance was little changed and those receiving extended benefits increased.
Well, if a climb of 8,000 made them drop their lattes, what do you think a correction of 800,000 is going to do. As in an additional 800,000 jobs lost – because they were cooking the books:
Job losses during the recession may have been underestimated by close to a million jobs. So instead of employers cutting just over 7 million jobs from their payrolls since the economic downturn began in December 2007, it’s expected that the Labor Department’s new estimate will be a loss of 8 million jobs.
“It’s an enormous understatement of the severity of the crisis,” said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a union-supported think tank. “It confirms that things were actually worse on the ground than what the reports suggested.”
The new reading will come when the economists at the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics release their annual revision of U.S. payrolls from April 2008 through March of 2009 Friday, using data that wasn’t available as the monthly readings were being estimated and reported.
The thesaurus must be smoking right now as they madly thumb through it to find a superlative to describe the situation. One is simply breathless with anticipation. Apparently, the keepers of the stats have just been blithely assuming that a whole bunch of new businesses have been opening their doors – despite the evidence of their own lying eyes – and have been “adjusting” the job loss data to count nonexistent new jobs.
So we have lost far more jobs than they have admitted up until March of 2009. That’s right, this adjustment does not include the past year. So we can look forward to another bleak downward revision a year from now. They can’t imagine or invent enough jobs to cover all we have lost.
So they want to spend even more. We can’t wait to see the math on these latest proposals. Let’s see, all the jobs they have invented or imagined so far are less than the negative correction – and they haven’t even corrected (downward) the 2009 numbers yet.
We just didn’t understand the nuance, apparently. They were stimulating unemployment.
And doing an amazingly effective job of it.
(Please remember that the Democrats have been in control of both houses of Congress since 2007. They own this mess. They’ll try to blame Bush and cry that it’s not Obama’s fault. But it is their fault.)
C’mon, when in doubt, go to the source:
The Media-Mainstream Dictionary defines
un·ex·pect·ed
Pronunciation: \??n-ik-?spek-t?d\
Function: adjective
Date: circa 1586
expected : foreseen
“Unexpected”
Something that every reasonably intellegent person saw ages ago, and was perfectly prepared to see announced officially.
Something we really wish we did not have to report.
“Unexpected”
The Great Depression and the Great Recession were both caused by basically the same thing. A great bubble of increased value well beyond its real value and the bubble subsequently bursting causing a massive evaporation of wealth followed immediately by a debt crisis.
In 1929 is was a stock market crash. Stocks had seen an unbelievable run up. People borrowed heavily on their paper gains. Many were greatly overextended on margin accounts. When the market imploded, the source of wealth that they were leveraging to obtain all sorts of other things evaporated. Banks that had lent money for margin trading (basically buying a lot of shares of stock but putting up only a portion of your own money with the bank putting up the rest) and these loans suddenly went “under water”. The banks did not have the reserves to cover these losses and started going broke. Business and industry could not get the loans it needed so at first they began reducing wages. Roosevelt then enacted a law that prevented industry from reducing wages and this resulted in plants closing and the people being put out of work. The worst years of the great depression were in 1932 and 1933, three to four years after the stock market crash.
In 2008 we had experienced a decade long real estate run up. Real estate is bought on “margin” in that you make a small down payment and the bank kicks in the rest. Some loans required no down payment at all. They were 100% on margin. In 2008 the price of real estate collapsed in many areas. People had been using increased home equity to borrow money for all sorts of things. Home “flippers” were keeping the home improvement contractors very busy doing repairs. Home equity loans were keeping them busy with improvements and repairs. People were buying boats, RVs, vacation property, cars, home improvements, etc. with home equity loans.
Now the wealth evaporates and these people are on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the property is worth. There is no more home equity. Bank reserves are wiped out as their loan portfolios are now under water. They can not lend to business and industry. Nobody is buying cars, boats, RVs, or getting home improvements done. Banks are failing.
It will probably be at least 2011 to 2012 before the full impact of this recession is felt and all the losses are worked through the system but it might take longer because the government is using the treasury to keep afloat people and companies that should simply go bankrupt and start over. They are delaying the pain and extending the recession.
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One thing I meant to say but missed. The role that Roosevelt’s wage controls played in the 1930′s is currently being played by labor unions. Companies and governments can not cut wages as the economy deflates which basically means that labor costs rise with the deflating economy.
If an employer’s income drops but they are unable to reduce wages, it forces them to shed employees. If the shedding of employees is too expensive due to labor contract requirements, it forces the company into bankruptcy and places all their employees’ jobs at risk.
Current contract policy is designed for an economy that is only growing and always inflating. It has no downside flexibility. The result is that when things do turn bad, current labor policy actually amplifies the damage.