Ward on Words

Just the other day, the payroll firm ADP issued a report that said more than 500,000 people had lost their jobs in May. They also revised their April unemployment records upward - to 545,000 from the previous estimate of 491,000. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued their report with a much sunnier view of the labor landscape - "nonfarm payroll employment fell by 345,000 in May, about half the average monthly decline for the prior 6 months." Not sure how the two organizations came up with different numbers but both estimate unemployment to be at 9.4 percent (which, as some have noted , is a worse scenario than depicted in the Fed's stress tests, but we all know those were rigged, right?) As you can imagine, the numbers cited by the BLS are happily received by the MSM. Some links to stories about this topic follow.... Denver Business Journal story on the BLS report WSJ story on BLS report MarketWatch story on ADP report

There's been much discussion of the value and impact of the recent bank stress tests. Saturday Night Live offers its interpretation: I give that skit an A for effort....

Workers continue to lose jobs! Unemployment rate in the U.S. has risen to 8.9 percent! That's the news out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. And yesterday, the Treasury Department rejoiced in their discovery that 19 of the biggest American banks could lose nearly $600 billion by the end of 2010, if the economy worsens! Other good news out of Treasury - ten of these 19 banks are now required to raise billions as a capital cushion! More than half of our biggest banks are teetering on the wire without an appropriate safety net! All this good news leaves me feeling like I'm inhabiting a Terry Gilliam movie. Why do I feel gloom instead of joy when reading these stories? What am I missing? According to the NY Times , the jobs report was "pretty encouraging." Because the loss of 539,000 jobs in April was not nearly as big a slide as we've seen in previous months (699,000 in March, 681,000 in February, 741,000 in January), the green shoot in th...

Dana Milbank's story in today's Washington Post is like a sprig of forsythia - a bright bloom amidst a bleak wintery backdrop of doubt and debt. Milbank starts the story with a rhetorical statement: "Maybe Barack Obama is really The One." And apparently the president ranks among those considered to have god-like qualities because of all the good news we're hearing today: "The economy? Recovering. The markets? Rallying. Swine flu? Abating. Drought? Ending." Such a difference 105 days makes! Just a few months ago, under Bush, the economy was so catastrophically battered that the government had to spend trillions to prop it up. And now, recovery blooms brightly this spring. But is it true? Or have we become caught up in a bubble of irrational exuberance once again? Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini are not nearly as giddy today as Milbank. In fact, they're kind of like a frost waiting to kill the lovely yellow blooms spring...