This Is Your Obama Economy, April Edition

The topline number has all the mainstream media bobbleheads a-tingling; unemployment is “down to 7.6%”.

It’s wind in sails, of course; the labor participation rate has dropped to 63.3%, the lowest it’s been in ten years of measuring, and the lowest it’s been so far in this recession.

Which means the actual share of the work force above the age of 16 actually working is 58.49%.

That number is…:

Almost 2.5% lower than the day Barack Obama took office (60.58%)
Statistically the same as October, 2010 (58.5%), when unemployment peaked at 10%.
Marginally up from December of 2010 (58.2%), when the recession bottomed out (and which looks like a statistical fluke, coming between two months in the 58.5% range)
Marginally better than the low-points in this calculation (58.18, in November 2010 and July 2011, when the unemployment rates were 9.8% and 9.1%, respectively).

It takes a lot of lipstick to make this look like anything but a pig.

Posted

April 5, 2013

President Obama, The Great Recession

Mitch Berg

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6 responses to “This Is Your Obama Economy, April Edition”

Terry

April 5, 2013

Another 11 million low skilled workers will enter the legal workforce within twelve months, if amnesty goes through.
You might want to ask Grover Norquist about this. he’s never seen an American job he wouldn’t rather have done by cheap immigrant labor, legal or illegal.
MtkaMoose

April 7, 2013

Hey Mitch – look who’s paraphrasing your work from last year!
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/m-jobs.html
Maybe we can get enough people thinking this way to make a difference in 2014 & 2016.
Emery

April 7, 2013

The figures from the BLS suggest that austerity may have begun to bite in March. And to some extent, this report simply drags expectations back to where they were early in the year, when it was anticipated that fiscal policy would meaningfully slow growth in the first half of the year but allow for an improvement later on. If surprisingly good numbers led some to believe that the American economy could shake cuts off without any effect, then perhaps they were a bit overly-optimistic. Hopefully just a bit.
Mitch Berg

April 8, 2013

Emery,

What “cuts?”

Sequestration/”austerity” shaves a little off of the planned spending increase. Nothing more.

The only “austerity” is in the private sector, and among America’s families.
bubbasan

April 8, 2013

Emery, 2% off something like 5% planned spending hikes is nothing like the very real 2% cuts in income most of us experienced this year.

Plus, let’s look at places where Comrade Obama likes to spend money–electric car companies, solar companies, most of them going bankrupt–and ask ourselves if we really think that his government spending does more for the economy than leaving it in private hands. My take is “no.”
Emery

April 8, 2013

Economists had expected the unemployment rate to remain at 7.7%. And yes, the decline is attributable to the fact that nearly 500,000 people dropped out of the labor market. Some economists have cautioned that not too much should be read into one month’s numbers, whilst other views have been tempered on the health of the labor market. Most expect, however, for hiring to continue at a steady pace for the rest of the year.

Payrolls can be volatile from month to month. Data available for the first quarter showed that companies extended payrolls by 168,000 a month, on average, which is roughly in line with the trend over the past two years. That should at least reflect one of the brighter notes from the BLS report. Hiring in January and February was revised upwards by 61,000 jobs.

It is forecast that employers will add around 2.24 million jobs over the course of 2013, and that 2.4 million jobs will be added next year. It is thought that unemployment in the US will be near 6.7% by the end of 2014, placing that prediction close to the 6.5% that the Federal Reserve has said it wants to see before considering raising interest rates.

Analysts have offered a variety of explanations for the March slowdown in employment, which some fear could be the beginning of another ‘spring swoon’. Some companies increased hiring in January and February, having hoped for a stronger economic rebound in 2013, but when sales didn’t meet expectations they have pulled back in March.

The slowdown in hiring will certainly make people less optimistic about economic growth moving forward, but the slowdown may also be attributed to seasonal factors that have dampened job growth each spring since the Great Recession.

The impact of the forced federal budgets cuts, which began on March 1, will be of concern, because they haven’t directly affected the March payroll figures by that much. The effect of the time-lag before they hit company payrolls are not likely to be felt until at least another few weeks.