US Employment Data Gives Sobering Does of Economic Reality

[Crewleader]

Sep 05, 2008 - 04:19 PM

By: Andy_Sutton

In the 1980's, the Ford Motor Company used the slogan “Quality is Job #1”. This was helpful in their campaign to compete with their Japanese counterparts who were perceived to have higher quality automobiles. It would seem, based on recent trends in the employment market that government is now Job #1. This morning's employment situation report contained some real shockers, the biggest being that the US unemployment rate is now at 6.1%, jumping from 5.7% a month ago. Out of the 7 subsectors tracked in the report, only government and education/healthcare are expanding. Since a good percentage of education and healthcare expenditures are financed either directly or indirectly by the government, it would seem that Uncle Sam is about the only one hanging out a Help Wanted sign these days.

Perhaps the worst part of the report though were the revisions for the past two months. June and July had previously been called the bottom of the job market by some pundits in the financial media. August's report showed not only that June and July were worse than originally thought, but that there is no indication of a bottom.

Here are some of the lowlights of the report:

• Manufacturing continued to lose jobs – 61,000 in August alone.

• July's nonfarm payrolls were revised downward by 58,000

• July's service sector jobs were revised downward by 47,000

Keep in mind that these are official numbers, tabulated using methodologies that have been shown to have more holes than a good piece of Jarlsberg Swiss cheese. In any case, the employment situation is bleak, initial claims for unemployment are well over what are generally used to ‘call' a recession, and even worse, these job losses are causing an increase in individuals raiding retirement savings accounts.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article6135.html

[whistle]

1. That's 166,000 jobs lost in August then