:: NFPs fell by 49,000 - unemployment up to 5.5%

UpInArms (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 01:07 PM Response to Reply #2

20. NFPs fell by 49,000 - unemployment up to 5.5%

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/jobless-rate-soar... WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The U.S. unemployment rate jumped by a half percentage point to 5.5% in May on the biggest increase in seasonally adjusted unemployment in 33 years, the Labor Department reported Friday. Nonfarm payrolls fell by 49,000 in May, the fifth consecutive decrease and in line with expectations of economists. See Economic Calendar. The economy has lost 324,000 jobs so far this year. Unemployment rose by 861,000 to 8.5 million, the government said. It is the biggest increase in unemployment since January 1975. The 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate was a shock, as economists expected a much smaller 0.1 percentage point gain to 5.1%. The jobless rate is the highest since October 2004. It was the biggest percentage point gain in unemployment since 1986. The report is likely to have little impact on the Federal Open Market Committee, which meets in three weeks. Analysts expect no change in the 2% federal fund target rate in the near future. Fed officials have said they believe the economy and the job market are likely to worsen in coming months before bouncing back by the end of the year. In May, job losses were concentrated in construction, manufacturing, retail and temporary help jobs. Health-care and government continued to be the bright spots for hiring. The average work week was unchanged at 33.7 hours. Total hours worked in the economy dropped by 0.1%. Of 274 industries, 45.4% were hiring in May. Of 84 manufacturing industries, 33.3% were hiring. Average hourly earnings rose 5 cents, or 0.3%, to $17.94. Average wages are up 3.5% in the past year, falling short of the increase in consumer prices. A broader measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers rose to 9.7% from 9.2%. ...more...

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DemReadingDU (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 01:14 PM Response to Reply #2

21. Increase in the jobless rate is the biggest since 1986

6/6/08 The unemployment rate took its biggest jump in more than two decades in May as employers once again cut jobs from U.S. payrolls, according to a government report Friday, showing a job market weaker than expected. The unemployment rate soared to 5.5% from only 5% in April. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had only forecast the closely watched rate would rise to 5.1% in the month. It was the biggest one-month jump in unemployment since February 1986, and the 5.5% rate is the highest level seen since October 2004. A jump of this magnitude, even over a period of several months, is considered a warning sign of a recession. The unemployment rate is now a full percentage point higher than a year ago. The Labor Department also reported that there was a net loss of 49,000 jobs in May, compared to a revised loss of 28,000 jobs in April. That was actually a touch better than economists' forecast of a loss of 60,000 jobs, but it marked the fifth straight month that the economy has lost jobs. Revisions to payroll estimates from earlier this year added 15,000 to the job losses in the first four months of the year. With the May loss, the economy has now shed 324,000 jobs so far this year, the worst start to a year since 2002, when the nation was still struggling with the after-effects of a recession http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/06/news/economy/jobs_may/i...

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Prag (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 02:12 PM Response to Reply #21

38. 1986?

Whoooowheee... Maybe it would've been better if they'd sort of snuck up on it, slowly, by telling the -TRUTH- for the past while?

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UpInArms (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 03:16 PM Response to Reply #21

56. That 70s show - The 1970s were bad enough the first time around

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/jobless-report-su... NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The 1970s were bad enough the first time around. Anybody who lived through oil shocks, gas lines, stagflation and leisure suits can't help but hope that those days will never return. But Friday's jump in unemployment, coupled with unprecedented jumps in oil prices and Middle East political tensions, sure seem to have us heading back to a pretty depressing future. The jobless rate rose 0.5% to 5.5% in May, the biggest month-to-month jump in seasonally adjusted unemployment in 33 years. See related story. True, the Labor Department numbers have to attempt to account for a time of year when lots of temporary workers come into the labor force. But the size of the jump and its breadth really overwhelm any hopes that the number is a fluke. The timing couldn't be worse for Ben Bernanke. ...more...

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DemReadingDU (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 03:41 PM Response to Reply #56

69. Poor Ben

I remember those 70s. I had 2 preschoolers, going back to college, 1 car to the family, and spouse unemployed. But hey, we survived, and can do it again. I do worry about my kids, now both grown and in their 30s with houses and their preschoolers. It's so different today where families have bigger houses, 2 cars, and both parents working. Not going to be easy when they realize they will need to cutback.

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Tansy_Gold (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 04:52 PM Response to Reply #69

88. What Kevin Phillips had to say about the 70s

When I read this a couple of nights ago, I burst out laughing. Talk about "right on"! from "American Theocracy: The peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century", (c) 2006 p. 53-56 The larger point, of course, is that because the twenty-first-century United States has a pervasive oil and gas culture from its own earlier zenith -- with an intact cultural and psychological infrastructure -- it's no surprise that Americans cling to and defend an ingrained fuel habit. Many of the museums and exhibits date from the 1980s. The hardening of old attitudes and reaffirmation of the consumption ethic since those years may signal an inability to turn back. The chance to do so came a quarter century ago. From the late seventies to the early eighties, oil consumption in the United States underwent a powerful reversal. Energy-using Americans had been scared. In 1976 the political combination of the Watergate scandal, the energy crisis, inflation, economic recession, and military collapse in South Vietnam (1975) dominated that year's election and cost Republicans the White House, albeit only by a thin margin. The new Democratic chief executive, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter -- by vocation a peanut grower and by religious belief a Sunday school-teaching Baptist -- had campaigned on a reformist vision. Even Texas gave him a narrow victory, casting its final twentieth-century vote for a Democratic president Forswearing the trappings of the imperial presidency, Carter left his limousine to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day in January 1977. Weeks later he made an energy speech on television wearing a cardigan sweater. In mid-1979 the embattled president underscored the second OPEC oil crisis by asking for "the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun." Nixon, before being completely overwhelmed by Watergate, had taken a similar but less ambitious tack on energy independence. Soon thereafter Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which among other things mandated a doubling of passenger-car fuel economy by 1985. Carter went further in 1977, declaring "the moral equivalent of war." The ideology and culture of the four Carter years were broadly anti-imperial, as they stressed energy conservation; peace (rather than arms sales) in the Middle East; skepticism of CIA clandestine operations and the overthrow of foreign governments; reduced conspicuous consumption; federal missionary work on behalf of solar power and renewable energy sources; smaller automobiles; and the enactment of a 55 mph federal speed limit. Carter also promoted government restraint in budgetary matters and a vague attempt to crystallize "less is more" and "smaller is better" viewpoints, both of these in opposition to earlier mandates to spend, build, produce, and consume. Militarily the Carter White House spoke softly and also managed to carry a pretty small stick. After the revolutionary government of Iran in 1979 seized fifty-three Americans from the U.S. embassy, the air rescue mission Carter ordered in the spring of 1980 failed. With the helicopters down in the Iranian desert a symbol of his greater ineptitude, Carter lost the 1980 election and is remembered as a weak president. The 1975-1985 revolution in energy efficiency, however, was a relative success. Together with spiking oil prices, a conservationist ethic tightened America's energy belt. Between 1977 and 1985 -- and in the face of an expanding economy -- oil demand fell by more than one-sixth. The percentage of oil consumed in the United States annually that had to be imported shrank from 46 percent to 30 percent. Inasmuch as two-thirds of the petroleum used in the United States went to keep automobiles on the road, the CAFE standards enacted in 1975 were a linchpin in this reduction. Where the average car in the United States got just fifteen miles per gallon that year, the figure by 1985 was twenty-five. California was in the forefront, having followed Governor Jerry Brown's call to move away from dependence on nonrenewable fossil fuels. Nationally, new homes were often twice as energy efficient as similar-sized predecessors. Appliances made even bigger gains. New refrigerators, for example, used only one-quarter the power of pre-1970s models. As for the U.S. manufacturing sector as a whole, its energy efficiency improved by 30 percent between 1977 and 1986. The conservation "weapon," once fired, was probably at least as efficient as the military operation would have been. . . . . By the mid-1980s, support for energy conservation was ebbing. For one thing, the Reagan-Bush administration had been lukewarm to it, reducing spending on solar energy by two-thirds, deemphasizing efficiency, and moving the spotlight back to petroleum. . . . Plummeting oil and gasoline prices soon put the ignition key back into the great American automobile culture. Further federal tightening of fuel-economy standards was rejected in 1985, adn Detroit also took advantage of the statute's permissive standards for light trucks by developing its soon-to-be bestsellers: sport-utility vehicles. For ten years, technological improvement had concentrated on fuel economy. Now automobile manufacturers returned to their pre-1973 priorities: powever, acceleration, and speed. (emphasis in the original) Phillips points out that both Reagan and Bush I -- and of course subsequently boooosh II and cheeeeney -- had deep roots in the oil bidness and were not likely to veer from a high-gasoline-demand philosophy. California has long been a major oil-producing state, as has Texas, so petroleum had a major impact on the economies of both states, not to mention the urban sprawl, lack of mass transit, etc., and concomitant automobile usage that distinguished both of those geographically large states. Like many SMWer and DUers, I lived through those "interesting" times as an adult -- my daughter was born in 76, my son in 77. In 1979, we built an earth-sheltered house and got a huge tax credit for it. It was energy efficient enough that we heated the whole 2000-square-feet of it with a single wood-burning stove and about 1.5 cords of hardwood per northern Indiana winter. I don't miss Indiana, but I miss that house! Almost got into an argument with BF the other night because he was saying the ONLY thing needed to turn the current situation around is for corporations to accept lower profits. I've learned not to waste my breath when he's got his mind made up on some simplistic resolution, but because I do remember the 70s and what we went through to survive them, I believe the general population needs to adapt to a different attitude. As we learned from Mother Earth News all those years ago, less IS more. Instead of dreading the arrival of the propane tanker that filled most of our friends' tanks to heat their homes through some of those bitter 70s and early 80s winters, we went out in the woods with the kids and selected a couple of trees to cut for the next winter's supply. We watched for squirrels and rabbits and deer and hawks. We hunted mushrooms. We marvelled at the spring's first violets (purple and yellow ones!), the redbud trees, the dogwood and sassafrass. We raked leaves, and the kids and dogs rolled in the piles before we took the leaves back to the woods to compost. We bought our soda in returnable bottles, not throw-away plastic. We remembered that we are part of the earth, not separate from it. In some ways, the 70s weren't all that bad. Leisure suits, on the other hand. ..... eeeeeeiuw! Tansy Gold

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Dr.Phool (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 04:08 PM Response to Reply #56

76. What happened to that nice rosey report yesterday? It said we added jobs.

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UpInArms (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 04:25 PM Response to Reply #76

80. ...

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ozymandius (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 04:43 PM Response to Reply #76

86. Yeah what happened? Could it be that whole thing was fiction?

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Ghost Dog (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 04:58 PM Response to Reply #56

89. "leisure suits" rofl.

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UpInArms (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-06-08 02:58 PM Response to Reply #2

50. RPT-Gauge of U.S. economy edges lower in week - ECRI

http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN064227052... NEW YORK, June 6 (Reuters) - A gauge of future U.S. economic growth edged lower in the latest week and its annualized growth rate slipped deeper into recessionary territory, a research group said on Friday. The Economic Cycle Research Institute, a New York-based independent forecasting group, said its Weekly Leading Index inched down to 132.4 in the week to May 30 from 132.8 in the prior period. The fall in the index was due to higher interest rates, lower stock prices and weaker housing activity, said Melinda Hubman, research associate at ECRI. The index's annualized growth rate fell to negative 6.2 percent, from minus 6.0 percent, which was its highest level since the week of Dec. 21. ...more...