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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (17100)	2/10/2004 8:19:33 PM
From: nextrade!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

a few comments related to the recent report, nypost.com Despite what other less-informed pundits may think, January's employment figures were very disappointing - even though Wall Street decided that 112,000 new jobs was enough to have a little party. The problem with the 112,000 is that most of those new jobs don't really exist. I'll let the Labor Department explain itself in this passage from page 3 from its Friday release: "Retail trade employment increased by 76,000 over the month, after seasonal adjustments. The industry had lost a total of 67,000 jobs in November and December. "Weak holiday hiring in general merchandise, sporting goods and miscellaneous stores meant that there were fewer workers to lay off in January, resulting in seasonally adjusted employment gains for the month." By now my readers should have a PHD (pretty high disdain) for Capitol Hill math. This one, though, is a cake taker. I'll translate: Included in the 112,000 new jobs in January were 76,000 jobs that supposedly exist because people who weren't hired in December couldn't be fired in January. Got that? They didn't get hired in December, or fired in January, so they showed up as new employees in January as a statistical fluke. So, really there were only an abysmally small 36,000 new jobs in January. Considering that the margin of error for the survey of companies from which this number is derived is about 156,000 up or down, those 36,000 new jobs aren't even worth mentioning. But even if I hadn't just pulled out the Labor Department's own words on this fluke, what intelligent person really thinks stores hired 76,000 checkout clerks and shelf stuffers after the holidays? And there are a dozen other points in Friday's jobs report that show just how anemic the labor market really is. I thought these wacky but favorable seasonal adjustments would make last Friday's number come out better than everyone was expecting. But the underlying growth was so weak that even a good hop on the seasonals in retailing and other areas couldn't make this an easy play for Washington. The situation is still the same: moderate economic growth which leads to very light job expansion. While attempting to not place my political views on this thread, I'll post only this url <G>; lp.org