Lucid Links (120809, Morning)
ISM catch-up: The Institute for Supply Management’s indices on economic sentiment released last week weren’t exactly cheerful, which is why you probably didn’t hear or see much about them in the establishment press.
When ISM’s Manufacturing Index went positive in August, President ‘Prompter’s teleprompter, in a hasty insertion at the opening of an unrelated speech, prompted him to tell America that:
For the first time in 18 months, our manufacturing sector has expanded, and the statistics used to measure manufacturing output is the highest it’s been in over two years.
The misinformed, grammatically-challenged teleprompter didn’t realize that the ISM index doesn’t measure output; it measures positive or negative sentiment. That said, the index has proven a very useful barometer of what’s going on in the economy.
Well, the Manufacturing Index is still positive and showing expansion, which is any reading above 50%. That’s a good thing, but in November it dropped to 53.6%. That was down from October’s 55.7%, and trailed expectations that it would come in at 55.0%.
The news about the Non Manufacturing Index, which covers the large majority of the economy (manufacturing is only about 15%), was much more troubling. It went into contraction, with a reading of 48.7%. That was down from the previous month’s 50.6%, and ended an expansion that lasted only two months. It also trailed expectations that it would increase to 51.5%. The Employment element of that index came in with a dismal reading of 41.6%, barely nudging up from 41.1%.
The news in Non Manufacturing is consistent with what the Wall Street Journal has called the Uncertainty Economy, and what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy since the summer of 2008. We will at best meander along in mediocrity, if not worse, until the uncertainty overhang caused almost entirely by Obama administration policies and initiatives significantly dissipates.
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An e-mailer has perceptively pointed out that the whole world has its terminology wrong on alleged human-caused global warming.
It’s not “man-made,” although some humans, mostly men, have posited and tried (failing miserably thus far, it turns out) to prove its existence.
Giving discredit where discredit is due, global warming is Mann-made, so named after Michael Mann, creator of the totally debunked “hockey stick” graph. That’s right, I said totally debunked, as in completely useless rubbish.
I would add that human-caused global warming, besides being a bunch of globaloney, is really Mann-made-up.
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Betcha the bolded figure won’t make the evening news:
The Obama Administration is touting that their stimulus program has saved or created 640,329 jobs since it was enacted back in February through the end of October. This number is updated and posted on the Administration’s recovery.gov web site. That amounts to $246,436 per job based on the $157.8bn that has been awarded so far!
As noted in mid-November, the entire basis for claiming 640,000 jobs “saved or created” is bogus. The claim is NOT based on going out into the real world and counting jobs (when that occurs, it’s only about 30,000, and even that is questionable).
At the time, I referred to the administration’s job-creation/saving exercise as “tokin’ on Okun,” which is worth a revisit. Here’s a brief statement of “Okun’s Law,” named after the late economist Arthur Okun (bold is mine):
Arthur Okun is known mainly for Okun’s Law, which describes a linear relation between percentage changes in unemployment and percent changes in gross national product. It states that for every percentage point that the unemployment rate falls, real GNP (GNP is now called “GDP” — Ed.) rises by 3 percent. Okun’s Law was based on data from World War II to 1960. He cautioned that the law was good only within the range of unemployment rates—3 to 7.5 percent—experienced in that time period.
The unemployment rate has never been below 7.5% since the stimulus passed in February (it was 7.6% in January). Additionally, Okun would have more than likely excluded growth temporarily induced by programs like Cash for Clunkers from any kind of estimated GDP growth considered to be driving increases in employment. On top of all that, there’s the dissembling fudge phrase “created or saved,” a term that was never used until after Election Day 2008.
The only thing more fraudulent than the administration “jobs created or saved” exercise is the globaloney CRUd.
