“OK, Ure, what is this BTR/STN crap in the headline? It’s too early to make me figure out Ure BS acronymwiticisms…” Fair enough: Buy the Rumor, Sell the News. Imminent new highs (and a chorus or two from the choir here at the East Texas Synod of the Church of the Almighty Dollar, member, FDIC, if you please): So that TWTR gain happened, alright, but the collateral damage was a Dow drooping a hun-and-a-half and don’t get your hopes up for a huge rally until the other side of options, come this time next week. (Damn, that was a long sentence!)
Just so, iron butterfly…so we jump next grasshopper to the job data just unleashed…
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 204,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 7.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in leisure and hospitality, retail trade, professional and technical services, manufacturing, and health care.
Household Survey Data Both the number of unemployed persons, at 11.3 million, and the unemployment rate, at 7.3 percent, changed little in October. Among the unemployed, however, the number who reported being on temporary layoff increased by 448,000. This figure includes furloughed federal employees who were classified as unemployed on temporary layoff under the definitions used in the household survey. (Estimates of the unemployed by reason, such as temporary layoff and job leavers, do not sum to the official seasonally adjusted measure of total unemployed because they are independently seasonally adjusted.) For more information on the classification of workers affected by the federal government shutdown, see the box note. (See tables A-1 and A-11.)
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (7.0 percent), adult women (6.4 percent), teenagers (22.2 percent), whites (6.3 percent), blacks (13.1 percent), and Hispanics (9.1 percent) showed little or no change in October. The jobless rate for Asians was 5.2 percent (not seasonally adjusted), little changed from a year earlier.
The Government Shutdown impact was also explained away:
Some agencies of the federal government were shut down or were | | operating at reduced staffing levels from October 1, 2013, | | through October 16, 2013. All household and establishment survey | | operations, including data collection, were suspended during | | that time period. Shortly after the shutdown ended, October data | | collection for both surveys began. The Bureau of Labor | | Statistics (BLS) delayed the publication of this release by 1 | | week to allow enough time to collect data. The reference periods | | for the surveys were not changed. The response rate for the | | household survey was within its normal range, and the response | | rate for the establishment survey was above average.
So one of the numbers that matters was the Civilian Labor Force… almost 3/4ths of a million workers were just “disappeared! (720,000 thousand, which is within a Seahawks game of 3/4 million.) which means the Labor Participation rate cratered to 62.8% which I have put an X on in this chart…
(Which is why auto sales are cratering, why home sales are cratering, why the market is declining, yada, yada…)
Which gets us to the CES Birth/Death Model… of the jobs which [allegedly] remained, 126,000 were simply “made up” based on statistical beliefs.
And then there’s the U6 Alternative Measures of labor under-utilization which shows what? the PhDs Flipping Burgers Index which is more politely shown in officialdumb as le A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization shows the U-6 number (U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force) rose from 13.6 to 13.8%.
How fun! Yes sir, this is Beliefs You Can Change In!
Next stop, then? Despite however the market takes the job numbers as, the Changer in Chief, I think, would be well-advised to play his “Delay Obamacare” card quickly, otherwise, the Joker on the table is no one will have 21-cents left with which to buy discretionary spending crap and that spells what, class?
Collapse, Part 2, (“Ure’s Revenge” opening soon on monitors near you!) Dow 4,000 or lower, but it won’t happen really fast…just sort of dogging the lame duck years ahead on the way to retirement (and we assume, more time for golf).
(sniff, sniff…) Why, You can almost catch of whiff of the shit on the way to the fan in NY Fed president William Dudley’s “Ending Too Big to Fail” remarks this morning at the Economic Policy Forum in New York.
The futures are down 56, but the markets will be lucky to hold the critical 1,740 S&P (as in all over the place today) level come the close.
Look, I’ve been telling you for a long time that until the US figures out how to tax robotics, we are on a one-way ride to hell economically. There simply won’t be enough jobs to keep people employed and those wanting benefits – hell requiring life support – will swamp government’s ability to pay.
The answer? Tax robotics and human-job replacing automation. The Labor Participation rate cratering should be an in your face proof.
If it’s not, Madison Avenue Mike cause the article “Will robots terminate the US middle class? A Q&A with Tyler Cowen, author of ‘Average is Over’”
Recommended reading (while you still have a job) Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation ($18 hardcover, see link for $11 Kindle.)
The hypelines “better than expected jobs report” are pukifying. Are we out of “sucker money?”
More after this…
The Geneva Flop
Once again, we see in the headlines another prediction coming true: The Israelis are seriously pissed about the outcome of the Geneva talks which were designed to hammer out some war-avoiding plan as Israel is ready to pop Iran.
“This is a bad deal – a very, very bad deal” says Benjamin Netanyahu of Obama secretly lifting Iran sanctions. If you’re placing bets on the precise moment the attack on the Iranian enrichment facilities will come, shade your bets accordingly.
Israeli disappointment is predictable. And with the quality of their military, although waiting for the dark of the moon would be nice, they may not be able to wait. They’ve been playing the waiting game and “giving peace a chance” but they seem intent on taking out Iranian nukes, so now (as before) it’s just a waiting game.
With the market decline of yesterday, want to bet the massive shorting of the markets which would accompany such action is already gearing up?
Lots of Opinions
But why would we care in Larry Summers “….is the latest to call Snowden a liar”? I mean, don’t look now, but the government hasn’t exactly fixed the economy or prevented the meltdown of housing, so why a former government economics fellow’s thoughts on Snowden would be painted as mattering, well, I’m just stumped by this.
Speaking of Snowden
Latest revelations in the case reveal that Snowden was able to convince about 20 NSA types to give up their logon information in order for him to do his [purported] work as a systems administrator. Apparently, there’s a kind of bait phishing for every fish…
Hungry
Food banks around the country are reporting a nightmare ripple effect from recent cuts in welfare.
Quick, PTB! Roll with that next big crisis so the MSM doesn’t have to focus on too much street-level reality.
There’s a kind of smugness that people don’t revolt in winter, but the Russian revolution (the February Revolution of 1917 – that happened in March) shows how little clarity there is on point.
But we obviously need a major world crisis quick, of the millions of hungry are going to roll into the center ring of the National Circus. One that shuts down dissenting opinion and stifles the internet would be fine…to shut up us damn rabble-rousers. (Or, clear-headed thinkers…)
Stormy Weather
Monster Storm is coming ashore in the Philippines. With 200 MPH winds, gotta wonder why some of the US wind farmers aren’t lined up…
Stormy Healthcare
The “Gee, sorry about that” is over here, if you care.
The Polonium Murders
So, if you think governments don’t go around killing people they don’t like, we assume you’ve been following the Swiss tests which proved that Yasser Arafat was killed by radiation poisoning?
The earlier case which made headlines involved, says Wikipedia:
Alexander Litvinenko was a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, FSB and KGB, who fled from court prosecution in Russia and received political asylum in the United Kingdom. According to his wife and father, he was working for MI6 and MI5 after receiving the asylum.
One could write a dandy novel along the lines of Russia and the West “signaling” each other with Litvinenko and Arafat…
