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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (21213)	6/16/2004 11:43:02 AM
From: philv	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81840

The C.P.I. statistic which came in benign was unfortunately late due to technical problems. The next set of inflation figures is the P.P.I. Unfortunately it too is being delayed for about a week due to technical difficulties. Repeat after me. There is no inflation.....there is no inflation....there is...... How else can they justify the present ridiculous interest rate, or the value of the currency? Repeat after me. There is no inflation. There are no bubbles. Debt doesn't matter. The dollar is sound. Life is good!! I know, because I heard it on CNBC.

To: sea_urchin who wrote (21213)	6/17/2004 3:13:48 PM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 81840

> playing psychological games instead --- allowing the "cognitive dissonance" of the market to let people believe that rates have already risen when, in fact, they are falling. And it's the same story with jobs. detnews.com >> Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan concurs. He testified before the Senate Banking Committee on Feb. 12 that “the payroll series is the more accurate number.” The payroll survey is better because it is much larger, it is checked annually against unemployment insurance tax records (in contrast to every 10 years for the household survey) and it is less likely to be subject to large revisions or misreporting. The payroll survey shows that employment has fallen by 718,000 since the recovery began. Michigan alone lost 2.7 percent of its jobs in this “recovery.” The claim that employment is at a record high is cherry-picking at its most blatant, an attempt to find improvements that are simply not there. Yes, the number of working people has grown, but population has grown faster. In fact, employment has grown only half as fast as what’s needed just to keep even with population growth. Even Wall Street economists at J.P Morgan agree that the unemployment rate “misrepresents the underlying state of the job market.” The percentage of working-age people in the labor market — that is, those who are working or looking for work — has dropped to its lowest rate in over 15 years. Contrary to conventional wisdom, J.P. Morgan economists claim that “the latest data indicate that more men than women have been pulling out of the labor force.” Goldman Sachs paints an even bleaker picture of today’s slack labor market, noting that if the same proportion of people were in the labor market today as there were seeking work in March 2001, the unemployment rate would be 7.4 percent. A close look at the payroll and household surveys shows very few cherries to pick. Since both tell political bad news, we should get back to good economics. Instead of trying to convince the public that bad news is really good news, the administration should be focusing on the problem at hand: an economy that isn’t generating enough jobs. <<