The February Employment Situation Report: The POR Economy Pours It On
Earlier this week, ADP said that private employers shed 697,000 seasonally adjusted jobs in February, the first full month since Barack Obama’s inauguration, just short of four months after his election, and roughly nine months into The POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy.
Today, Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Labor Statistics chimed in similarly about all employers:
Nonfarm payroll employment continued to fall sharply in February (-651,000), and the unemployment rate rose from 7.6 to 8.1 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Payroll employment has declined by 2.6 million in the past 4 months. In February, job losses were large and widespread across nearly all major industry sectors.
An update to the post-election job loss totals, as well as those since the POR Economy began, is on the way.
UPDATE: Revisions to prior months show that an additional 161,000 seasonally adjusted jobs were lost in December and January compared to what was reported last month.
Over 3.6 million seasonally adjusted jobs have been lost since the POR Economy’s impact on employment can fairly be said to have begun (the POR Economy began sometime in June,
In the months since Obama’s election, the current period has underperformed the prior period in regards to actual, on the ground, not seasonally adjusted employment changes by almost 3.0 million — and the previous comparables were not that impressive in the first place:
UPDATE 2: From Bloomberg –
President Barack Obama now has the distinction of presiding over his own bear market.
Well, that’s a start to admitting to the full course of events. As noted yesterday, as of Thursday’s close, the markets were down an average of close to 50% since the POR Economy kicked in, if June 1, 2008 is defensibly used as the best approximate benchmark for when it began.
Without job creation, the new people coming into the market (498,000 increase as shown by the Civil Labor Force #) magnified the number of unemployed. Employment rolls shrank by 351,000 but 851,000 people lost their jobs.
Basically what’s happening is as new people come into the market, get jobs, the other people losing their jobs more than replace them on the unemployment line. If this keeps up by July there will be 4 million more people unemployed due to demographics. Via turn over in the job market, 4 million people graduating high school and college will get jobs and 4 million people who had them will lose them. Based on this, my prediction for July unemployment if there is no job creation occurring in the next 4 months is 16,500,000 people unemployed. That translates into roughly an unemployment rate of 11.6%
Did you notice that they finally have started reporting the Hispanic numbers on the summary? These numbers were formerly only available via the tables and normally were included in the summary’s white populations stats.
The interesting part is the drop in Not in Labor Force #. A hopeful sign that illegals are finally being removed from the workforce in significant numbers? Wishful thinking on my part maybe. http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab3.htm If you look at their civilian labor force numbers, they have finally leveled off and show a negative trend.
Comment by dscott — March 6, 2009 @ 9:35 am
btw- given that many people based their retirement on 401k and IRAs, now that the market is off by 50%, those plans have been dashed. Those people who would have normally retired between the ages of 62 to 65 are now forced to stay in the workforce until their plans get back up to DOW levels of 14,000 to recover their money, at that point they will leave the job market in droves. This is why the 4 million net increase will occur by July since young people will not be replacing those who retire, they now will be in competition to those who retire. It’s all in the demographics folks, it was completely forseeable.
Comment by dscott — March 6, 2009 @ 9:54 am
The rise in unemployment is part of the cycle. It’s happened many times before, see, for instance,
http://www.recessioninfocenter.com/Recession_Information_on_unemployment.html
I think in the long term we’ll be fine. In the short-term it will be a bumpy road though…
Comment by Jeff — March 6, 2009 @ 10:16 pm