In the month of September 1945, the U.S. had a loss of 1,967,000 jobs, because World War II had ended. In the month of September 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a gain of 1,115,000 jobs.
The Federal Reserve Industrial Production & Capacity Utilization report shows industrial production gained 0.2% in January. There were also revisions back to August with all but one month revised downward. December was revised to a -0.3% decline and November's blow out was toned down to 1.1% growth increase. Manufacturing alone grew by 0.2% and utilities jumped up 2.3% in January on weather.
Is it passive aggression? Is it cruel antagonism? Is it overt animosity? Is it open hostility, bordering on outright hate? Or it's much less evil that; maybe it's just apathy, ignorance or indifference.
US oil and gas drilling operations continued to shut down at an unprecedented rate last week, as Baker Hughes reported the rig count on February 13th was at 1358, down by a record 98 rigs from February 6th, with oil rigs down 84 to 1056, gas rigs down 14 to 300, and rigs classified as miscellaneous unchanged at 2. This follows last week's report when total US drilling rigs in use fell by 87,
Two more reports from last week that we want to look at were on December sales and inventories for different sectors of the economy. We want to know how they might affect 4th quarter GDP revisions. Here's a simplistic way to think about how sales and inventories in the economy affect GDP: If the economy consumes 10 apples at a dollar a piece in November, and 11 apples at 90 cents each in December, sales have gone down by 1% in December but monthly GDP is up 10%. If there are 10 apples left on the shelf in both months, reported inventories will go down 10% in December, but
Retail sales started the new year down, but the drop in sales was due to lower gasoline prices. Specifically, the Advance Retail Sales Report for January (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that our total seasonally adjusted retail and food services sales were at $439.8 billion in January, which was a decrease of 0.8% (±0.5%) from the December sales of $443.3 billion, but 3.3 percent (±0.9%) above sales in January of last year. December's sales were revised up by less than 0.1%, from $442.9 billion,
It didn't take long before the new GOP House began passing a series of deficit-hiking tax cuts that will primarily help the rich at the expense of everybody else. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the new chairman of the Ways and Means Committee (which writes tax legislation), wants to make some previous tax breaks permanent — arguing that Congress has previously extended certain tax breaks before.
But without raising taxes on anyone earning more than $118,500 a year. The only thing that was not said at the Senate Hearing on Social Security disability today was: "Read my lips."
The BLS employment report is another good showing for payroll jobs as growth was 257,000. January is the month of revisions and November 2014 is now a 423,000 jobs added blowout with December 2014 not far behind with 329,000 jobs added. We're on year eight after the start of the great recession and 2014 is finally when America started seeing some jobs growth.
Noah Smith (at Bloomberg) recently wrote: "A plurality of Americans still consider themselves middle-class.” (A plurality meaning, more than any other, but not an absolute majority.) But he linked to The Guardian to make his case, which appears to be saying something completely different:
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