Everybody is all up in arms because the weekly initial claims data was released 15 hours early. Yup, folks, people trade on this report and it's a classic example of herd behavior.
The U.S. June 2012 monthly trade deficitdeclined $5.12 billion to $42.924 billion. This is a -10.66% monthly decrease in the trade deficit, mainly due to increased exports. Exports increased $1.666 billion, or +9.09%. Imports declined $3.454 billion, a -1.49% decrease from May and mainly due to lower crude oil prices. This is the smallest monthly trade deficit in 18 months.
Ah, we all know the claim offshore outsourcing is good for America. Seems offshore outsourcing is great for drug dealers and money launders too. Did you know offshore outsourcing enabled money laundering, flash crashes and failed projects?
The DFS probe found that SCB had assured the New York state in May 2010 that it would take immediate steps to comply with the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions. However, another regulatory examination in 2011 found continuing and significant Anti Money Laundering failures.
Among these, the bank was outsourcing its "entire OFAC compliance process for the New York branch to Chennai, India, with no evidence of any oversight or communication between the Chennai and the New York offices."
You f---ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we‟re not going to deal with Iranians. -- SCB‟s Group Executive Director
Laudering money for rogue nations and drug cartels seems to be par for the course. The latest scandal is this bomb: a British bank has been laundering Iranian money for over a decade. The New York State Department of Financial services filed an Order Pursuant to Banking Law § 39, which that describes willful and egregious violations of law by Standard Chartered Bank, aka SCB. The above quote is part of the documentation against SCB.
For almost ten years, SCB schemed with the Government of Iran and hid from regulators roughly 60,000 secret transactions, involving at least $250 billion, and reaping SCB hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. SCB‟s actions left the U.S. financial system vulnerable to terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins and corrupt regimes, and deprived law enforcement investigators of crucial information used to track all manner of criminal activity.
The BLS JOLTS, or Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey reports the never ceasing abysmal jobs market. The June 2012 statistics show there were 3.39 official unemployed persons for every position available*. There were 3,762,000 job openings for June 2012, a 2.87% increase from the previous month of 3,657,000. Openings are still way below pre-recession levels of 4.7 million. Job openings have increased 72% from their July 2009 trough, yet opportunities are miles away from the 1.8 persons per job opening ratio at the start of the recession, December 2007. There are some in the press who focus on levels, to make the job market seem better than it is. Not so, it's still horrific. Below is the graph of June official unemployed, 12.749 million, per job opening.
There are some absolutely ridiculous articles on the July jobs report. Some are proclaiming the economic slowdown is over, which is absurd on it's face. One cannot conclude that from one month of payrolls data which will probably be revised.
The July employment report is a little schizoid in that one employment survey showed a decline of 195,000 employed people while the other, the actual payrolls reported by businesses, showed an increase of 163,000 jobs. Below is the employment levels from the CPS survey.
The July 2012 BLS unemployment report shows total nonfarm payroll jobs gained were 163,000. Don't get too excited, while above expectations this is still a mediocre report. June's payrolls were revised down, from 80,000 to 64,000. May's payrolls were revised up, from 77,000 to 87,000. The below graph shows the monthly change in nonfarm payrolls employment.
Ah, we all know the claim offshore outsourcing is 
Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop. 
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