Unemployment 10.2% for October 2009

Well, it happened. The official unemployment rate jumped to 10.2% for October.

October 2009 unemployment rate

Here is the press release.

The unemployment rate rose from 9.8 to 10.2 percent in October, and nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline (-190,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The largest job losses over the month were in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade.

What's U6? 17.5%.

The number of people on unemployment at or greater than 15 weeks? 8. 834 million. At or greater than 27 weeks? 5.594 million.

Average duration on unemployment? 26.9 weeks.

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The private sector is just not creating jobs

and I doubt that they will be able to do so for quite some time. I guess we are stuck with long-term staggering unemployment because Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats are too scared to act boldly.

I read somewhere where Mr. Summers was not in favor of extending unemployment compensation.

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they won't do what is needed

which is directly funds at workers and to directly employment them. They also need to Stimulate small business, new business, tackle bad trade deals and stop offshore outsourcing Federal and State contracts.

Thanks for finding that chart, you noticed I put it in this Instapopulist.

This is a huge deal, we have official double digit unemployment.

I know. I am so pissed. I am trying to collect my thoughts.

It is like one big game of "kick the can down the road". The Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats are trying to make it look like they are doing something. Look at regulatory reform, look at the stimulus, hell, look at health care reform. It's all kick the can down the road so that we can get our campaign contributions and get re-elected to one or two more terms then get out and become a high paid lobbyist.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

Team Obama going to add more useless measures

claiming to create jobs Bloomberg:

My economic team is looking at ideas such as additional investments in our aging roads and bridges, incentives to encourage families and business to make buildings more energy efficient,” additional tax cuts, and more steps to ease the flow of credit to small business and promote exports

Just ridiculous! They need a WPA or a CCC and to create a federal VC fund for small business, not more "oh ease credit" and oh, put energy efficient light bulbs and insulation in your home!

We don't need "investments" we need jobs for roads and bridges, direct employment, direct jobs.

Not a mention of dams and levies, many of which are in red hot danger.

Yeap. It requires bold action but they are more concerned

about keeping their jobs instead of doing what people elected them to do: solve problems.

As for "ease the flow of credit" didn't we and to a certain extent continue to do that and it's not working. Why? Because the financial sector is practically insolvent.

If the President wants to 'ease the flow of credit' then the gov't will have to be the credit provider - directly. But that's too bold and we don't want to offend the financial oligarchy.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

Exactly, Mr. Oak, exactly!

"Just ridiculous! They need a WPA or a CCC and to create a federal VC fund for small business, not more "oh ease credit" and oh, put energy efficient light bulbs and insulation in your home!"

Just so. Back in 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton, on a CBS interview,proclaimed that America needs a national high speed rail network, which would provide jobs and be an economic asset for years to come.

Sound familiar? President Obama said the same just a short time back. Japan has had bullet trains (high speed rail) since, if memory serves, 1964! One assumes that either high speed rail is beyond America, or Corporate America is so completely and totally screwed up, incompentent, inefficient and corrupt that such a thing is beyond their abilities.

According to that BLS study and NY Times accompanying article profiled at this site awhile back, the so-called private sector (so-called as they are so completely government subsidized, paying few federal taxes and given so many tax breaks and freebies) hasn't effectively created any new jobs form July 1999 to July 2009! At least not in America!

Still the best new recommended manufacturing industry in America: the guillotine industry --- soon to be in major demand outside the halls of congress and on Broad Street in NYC.

IBM doesn't create jobs w/ state, fed tax breaks

I know IBM has negotiated, many times, tax breaks, turns around, doesn't create jobs, simply exports even more jobs and demands to import foreign guest workers on top of it.

What's even more ridiculous, is the states do not sue IBM for the money back plus cancel their contracts.

I'm picking on IBM because I know this to be the case, but I believe this has happened with many state, federal contracts. They promise to create local jobs as part of the tax incentives, then just take those incentives and offshore outsource/insource (bring in foreign guest workers) the jobs instead.

That BLS and NYT article worry me

because what we are seeing and what happened during the past 10 years has been a huge increase in the length of unemployment. On top of the lack of job creation.

My worry: Are we seeing a fundamental change in the labor market that we are not prepared to address and without serious policy changes we will see further destruction of middle class?

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

strange times

Savor the irony: Robert Oak calls for classic New Deal programs like WPA and CCC. Meanwhile, blogger New Deal Democratic over at Bonddad is singing ‘Everything’s coming up is coming up roses (aka green shoots) and ‘there's going to be a chicken in every pot.’ He is positively happy.

Bonddad doesn’t think of economics in human terms. It’s a game to him. He writes today that there is something in the labor statistics for everyone. The bulls will find good news and bears will find bad. Bulls and Bears being teams that one bets on. There is no humanity in those numbers.

Meanwhile, the most anti labor blogger on the net, Mish is posting heart wrenching stories about the pain and suffering of real people. Go figure.

And, today more happy people at CNBC are falling all over themselves with glee showing the enormous profits that corporations are showing. These same people a couple of months ago did a whole segment on how outrages it was for Bank of American workers to unionize. How dare they want a union and higher wages when taxpayers are supporting B of A. Taxpayer money supporting profits is good – supporting labor bad.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is reporting today the armored vehicles that the defensive industry built for $26.8 billion are being blown up left and right by men in skirts.

"The traditional MRAP was having real problems . . . off road in Afghanistan ," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell…retired Army Col. Douglas A. MacGregor , a former armored cavalry commander and combat veteran and an expert on armor warfare, said that vehicles such as the MRAP have "very limited utility" in a war against a guerrilla group such as the Taliban …"The notion of a wheeled armored constabulary force as a prescription for a close combat situation is nonsense," he said.

Wages for clerks at B of A are immoral and a threat to the economy. Billions for useless armaments to conquer a country for reason not perfectly clear - not a peep.

These are some really strange times we live in.

honestly

I don't know what's going on with some "other bloggers". I would suggest reading some of the middle column blogs. Calculated Risk has really graphed a host of data from today's unemployment statistics.

I mean in terms of analysis, one needs to look at the track record of being right or wrong.

Those trying to hang on to claim there is a recovery in employment, well, I'd say at this point the train has left the station. i.e. dead ass wrong if you look at past posts and predictions. With 17.5% U6 and 10.2% official, plus the longest average time to be on unemployment, we indeed have a major problem with the labor market in the U.S. today and it ain't going away real soon.

That's just great on the vehicles in Afghanistan, I didn't know that. This is an entire topic, not just on wars, but the overall disconnect with the government and how it awards contracts and how much waste is involved.

I mean in terms of online databases, software, technology, it's astounding to me the beyond belief contract awards, who got the money and just how badly they do not deliver.

Here we have all sorts of techies out of a job in the U.S. American techies, people more than capable of database design for example, implementation.

Maybe a "top 10" billions in waste/incompetence of various contracts. I believe the recently killed (finally) F-22 would top that list.

State contracts, which don't get hardly any spotlight, my God, it's just astounding the money and the lack of correct functioning software.

I mean it's so bad, who cannot punt and say "give it to Google" at this point. I'd be fine with that if they tied U.S. workers to force Google to hire people to get these contract awards, but at least Google has a technical clue!

After reading CRs

post on unemployment and stress tests makes me wonder if things are very bad for financial conglomerates. Theoretically, unemployment is probably a much more important factor then GDP growth because obviously it goes to the potential health of their loan portfolio and credit card portfolio. And with each rise in unemployment probably means more loans in distress and credit card defaults.

Just wondering.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

why are workers an after thought with the overall economy?

no job, no income, can't make the mortgage payment and can't pay Visa/MC their outrageous interest rates.

That's why it is a major factor in the stress tests and most interesting since the original stress tests did not consider an unemployment rate this high.

I find it almost bizarre how government/business acts like the unemployment rate, wages, hours worked and so on are almost an after thought.....as if this isn't a major factor in overall GDP.

Hey, notice how Q3 GDP and the unemployment rate are quite diverged? That would be an interesting study but to me at the moment, points to more evidence Q3 GDP was all about home owners tax credit and cash for clunkers (i.e. Stimulus).

That's what all the growth was about but what will be

interesting and I am going to check recent numbers but the amount of household debt - did it actually go up because of those programs. I doubt many people were buying homes and cars with cash.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

Krugman weighs in on a WPA/CCC

here (Is Krugman an EP lurker???) Basically he says the reason they don't do it is politics, which is probably correct.

Although I would claim the politics have more to do with private contractors, lobbyists than the "Tea party" crowd.

But what's good is he's raising it and says it needs to be discussed.....

so I guess now the question is, what current administrations, government infrastructure is there which could be quickly built upon to manage directly something like a WPA and/or CCC?

The CCC by itself would be very tricky it today's ACLU insane PC world for it was men only, in camps, being given food, clothing, medical care, free education, training, but only $30/day and $25 of that went directly to their families.

So, you can see the war on that one, even though it was an awesome program, gave us all of those cool trails, roads, state, national parks, swimming pools, all sorts of nice public works which added to U.S. and dare I say tourism to our national and state parks....

but you can see the issues, firstly only guys would raise hell and that implies they would need two camps but the wages are obviously way below minimum wage, so unions as well as minimum wage laws...perhaps they could pay minimum wage yet still offer the rest of the supports?

I think the military frankly would know how to do this....they already have integrated women and men into the military, understand all of these logistics, have their own training system and so on. Of course that would raise hell and hairs having the military involved.

So to me, firstly one needs to lay out the specifics on how it could be done, yes the Federal government directly manages this, makes sure U.S. citizens/perm residents get the jobs, income goes directly to workers plus education, training too.....

Breaking down the unemployment numbers

John Mauldin broke down the unemployment numbers and showed just how bad they really are.

What I did not see in many of the stories I read was that the number of unemployed actually soared by 558,000, to 15.7 million, as measured by the household survey. The establishment survey polls larger businesses; the household survey actually calls individual households.
Let's look at the real number in the establishment survey. If you don't seasonally adjust the number, the actual change in unemployment for October was 641,000, or about 450,000 more than the seasonally adjusted number. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics added 86,000 jobs that they simply guess were created through the so-called birth-death ratio. Interestingly, the birth-death ratio number is not seasonally adjusted, so it is just added to the unemployment number.
...
My favorite slicer and dicer of data, Greg Weldon (www.weldononline.com), offers up an even more horrific number. As I have noted before, if you have not looked for work in the last four weeks, the BLS does not count you as unemployed. Quoting Greg:
"Moreover, when we combine the monthly change in the number of Unemployed, with the number Not in the Labor Force, we might consider the result to be a proxy for the actual 'change' in the underlying labor market situation ... in which case, October's figure of 817,000 represents the fourth LARGEST yet, behind last month's (September's) second largest figure of 1,021,000 ... for a two-month combined figure of 1.838 million, in newly Unemployed, or no longer 'in' the Labor Force ...
"...the second LARGEST two-month total EVER posted
, barely trailing the December-08/January-09 total 1.955 million.
"Bottom line ... basis this measure AND the 'Total Unemployment Rate,' we could conclude that not only is there NO 'improvement' in the labor market, but moreover, that it continues to DETERIORATE, intently."

we need strong action

I've got one, cancel all Federal and State offshore outsourcing contracts and hire Americans immediately. I don't know the total number of jobs but it's in areas like food stamp call centers, back end management of social services, a host of jobs that pretty much anyone with a little training can do.

It doesn't make sense to send U.S. taxpayer dollars offshore anyway, esp. in terms of government spending stimulating an economy.

But it's clear we need dramatic, no holes barred action.