The BLS report (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm) came out today with a surprising .1% drop in the unemployment rate to 9.4% (U-6 is at 16.3%), which many here and elsewhere are proclaiming is a turnaround in the employment situation. While this may be the case, other data in that same report leave me doubting that we are going to see any meaningful improvement in the employment situation for some time.
On July 9, 2009, FDIC issued a notice of proposed Statement of Policy. The public comment period ends August 10, 2009 (go to http://www.FDIC.gov/regulations/laws/federal/notices.html if you want to file a public comment). The private equity firms have submitted their comments and obviously they don't like the FDIC proposal.
Our banking system is in dire need of new capital. Consider this: FDIC is forecasting as many as 500 bank failures in the near future. Pretty bad situation.
A new report out from the BLS today reports that the unemployment rate fell from 9.5% in June to 9.4% in July.
As we've been covering here the weird situation with auto layoffs this year has played hell with the seasonal adjustment formula that the government uses to normalize numbers for regular seasonal ups and downs.
And when you look at the actual report (Table A-11) you can see that the there was no change in the nonadjusted unemployment rate, which held steady at 9.7%.
Our national goals, in the medium term, must be to near fully employ those 30 million currently unemployed American workers, and in the process to more than double the number of Americans working in manufacturing, which is the least amount needed to get our economy back on track sustainably.
It's all about jobs -- whatever it takes!
I will reprint their main policy recommendations, all topics we've covered here.
Fund a 10-year (not the current two-year) program of significant public investment to upgrade and rebuild our nation's infrastructure, which will provide the much-needed foundation for higher-value added production and advanced business services.
At the end of June nearly 1/4 of all homeowners with mortgages owed more on their homes than the home was worth.
Some 24% of owner-occupied homes had mortgage debt that exceeded the values of those homes at the end of June, according to data from Equifax and Moody’s Economy.com. That number rises to 32% when looking at the share of homeowners with mortgages that don’t have equity left in their homes.
Overall, 16 million homeowners are “upside-down” on their mortgages, up from 10 million, or 15% of owner-occupied homes, one year ago.
New orders for manufactured goods in June, up four of the last five months, increased $1.4 billion or 0.4 percent to $349.0 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today. This followed a 1.1 percent May increase.
Excluding transportation, new orders increased 2.3 percent. Shipments, up following ten consecutive monthly decreases, increased $4.9 billion or 1.4 percent to $358.3 billion. This followed a 0.8 percent May decrease.
Unfilled orders, down nine consecutive months, decreased $6.5 billion or 0.9 percent to $740.2 billion. This was the longest streak of consecutive monthly decreases since November 2001-July 2002. This followed a 0.3 percent May decrease.
I couldn't resist the drama. This headline is a reaction to all of the misleading headlines of the past week. The stock market is having trouble with this piece of news:
U.S. service industries unexpectedly contracted at a faster pace in July as concern over rising unemployment gripped consumers.
The Institute for Supply Management’s index of non- manufacturing businesses, which make up almost 90 percent of the economy, fell to 46.4 from 47 in June, according to the Tempe, Arizona-based group. Fifty is the dividing line between expansion and contraction.
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