President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Yup. This is anecdotal more than empirical, but the job market -- on the lower end f the pay scale, though -- remains pretty tight. Service and retail jobs, for example. If you have a shop or a restaurant or do something hospitality oriented, you are probably desparately looking for warm bodies right now.

The flip side of that is that the economy has undoubtedly slowed down a lot so far this year (and this has nothing to do with Joe Biden or Congress, it is purely a function of the stimulus they injected with the pandemic as an excuse filtering through, and now the Fed taking ceremonial actions to slow things down because of the inflation their monetization of all of the debt unleashed). And we are seeing a lot of hiring freezes and layoffs. Those jobs are mostly on the higher end of the wage scale. It's been a lot of the big tech companies, Wall Street, etc. that are starting to make the cuts. Hit google news over the last 3, 4 months to see what I am talking about.

On the labor tightness for lower wage jobs. ... that definitely signifies a shortage of workers. That is obvious, right? But getting back to the labor force participation rate. ... when you have millions of healthy adult "discouraged" workers who are not working rather than taking those jobs. ... and they aren't being counted. ... and we have clearly created a welfare state of sorts that is keeping those people from starving due to not needing those jobs (we are up over 20 percent of the population receiving transfer payments via SNAP, SSI, Medicaid, the earned income tax credit, etc.), everyone who pounces on a ridiculous headline number from an economic report to score points for their team doesn't really give a shit about reality, they just care about telling everyone what reality is, even if it means to not believe your lying eyes.

Most people in this country are not doing that well right now. Price rises have hit people hard, and even if the CPI number that comes out next week shows that the runaway rise in prices has peaked, 6, 7 percent inflation (and they underreport this too), or whatever they put out there, is not a good thing. On top of it, anyone who WANTS a job can find one. ... but we're mostly talking about jobs that a lot of people are not all that gung ho about. And if the economy continues to slow, or the Fed actually deals with inflation (although they won't) and lets the credit crisis that is coming happen sooner rather than later (the longer they prop things up the worse the defaults are going to be), that "everyone who wants a job" thing is going to change in a hurry.

 

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/s...ders-hit-all-time-high-unexplained-18-million

I just sorta checked what they are saying, but I need to go overi it more thoroughly later. What they are saying would be totally consistent with the last few months. Essentially, the household survey is painting a clear picture of fewer people working, with some of the layoffs I mentioned in my last post showing up,. But a record number of people are working two or more jobs now, with all of the jobs being held by one person being counted by the BLS as a new FULL-TIME job. To what degree that is true, or how much of a factor it is, I can't say. I can't go through the data until later.

But heir wink wink speculation above was that the BLS is fudging what the Establishment Survey finds, via their usual "seasonal adjustment factors" that allow them to make the number say whatever they want. ... with a nudge from the White House which already is fighting the GDP numbers to insist that we're not in recession.

 

BTW, if what the link I posted above says is true, nobody should ever believe any of the BS that comes out of the BLS again.

When they used a made up "Covid" seasonal adjustment to turn a loss of 2.8 million jobs in their survey into a gain of 450,000+ jobs in their report earlier this year, I called BS, but gave them enough of the benefit of the doubt to hold out hope that they weren't outright liars, perhaps they were so blinded by the statistical work they thinking they are doing to make the numbers "better" that they didn't realize their rabbit hole has turned into a canyon.

But if what that link says is true, and they are simply now reduced to creating seasonal factors that turn a record number of people who work 2 or 3 side hustles instead of a full-time job, into multiple new full-time jobs, it kind of lays to rest any idea that anything the BLS puts out there isn't dishonest (to try to benefit whoever is in the White House).