Helped by the "first-time home buyer" tax credit and other forms of government assistance, home prices -- as measured by the Case Schiller Composite 20 index -- rose for the third straight month, up 0.97%, but still down 11.36% on a year-over-year basis, and off 29.89% from its May 2006 peak (note below when I reference peak levels they are from May 2006, not from the individual city peaks, which might have been a few months before or after the national peak). Since home prices do exhibit a fair amount of seasonality, I am working with the seasonally adjusted numbers. Most of the press has a habit of tracking the unadjusted numbers, which I feel is a mistake. So realize that the numbers presented here might be different from what you read in the newspaper tomorrow. A total of 16 of the 20 cities registered price increases, ...

Ugly, just plain ugly -- that's the best way to describe the September employment report. The economy dropped 263,000 jobs in the month, and 7.2 million now since the start of the recession back in December of 2007. The total number of unemployed rose to 15.1 million, an increase of 7.6 million since the recession began. That brought the unemployment rate up to 9.8%. Silver linings were few and far between in this report. One of the few good news items was that the number of jobs lost in August was revised to 201,000 from 216,000. However, July was revised down to a loss of 304,000 jobs from 276,000. This is the highest unemployment rate since the middle of 1983. Back in the early 1980’s, demographics (Baby Boomers and women entering the labor force) made the natural rate of unemployment much higher than it is today, so ...

By just about any measure, this has been the worst recession since the Great Depression. While I think we are coming out of it, the employment market is the last thing to turn, particularly if we follow the pattern of the last two recessions and their aftermath. We have seen a steady pattern of lower job losses since January, when we hemorrhaged over 700,000 jobs in that single month. August’s loss of 216,000 is sure an improvement over that, and is even a big improvement over the 276,000 lost in July, which in turn was a huge improvement over the 463,000 lost in June. It is, however, not good enough -- the economy needs to add jobs, not just avoid losing them. Every year, the workforce grows by a little over a million, so just to stay even we should be adding about 100,000 a month. To recoup the 6.9 million ...

The jobs report this morning was much better than expected and marks a very serious improvement from where we were just a few months ago. Not only did the number of jobs lost fall to 247,000 in July, but the unemployment rate (U-3) declined to 9.4% from 9.5%. The consensus expectation was that the number of jobs lost would be about 325,000 and that the U-3 unemployment rate would be 9.6%. In addition, there were also positive revisions to both June and May, with “only" 303,000 jobs lost in June rather than the 322,000 originally reported. May was revised to a loss of 443,000 jobs from a loss of 467,000. While it is hard to celebrate almost a  quarter of a million Americans being thrown out of work in a single month, it sure beats 670,000 jobs we were losing on average from November through March. It is just ...

World trade experiencing a “huge drop”, according to the World Trade Organization.  Rather than the gloomy 9% predicted earlier this year, volume will likely contract by 10%.

WTO Director General Pascal Lamy, told Reuters Television:

That’s the situation and I’m afraid I can’t read any good news in my trade numbers.

This news doesn’t bode well for any type of recovery. “Jobs picture turns gloomier” say the headlines. The U.S. unemployment rate officially popped up to 9.5% as nonfarm payrolls shed 467,000 jobs in June. The market is tanking today on this “brown shoot”… But the real story is far worse. And as reality seeps into the empty head of Joe Investor it could spell the end for the post-2008 wipe-out sucker’s rally…

As James Davidson points out in Crisis Strategy Alert, the BLS numbers have been massaged, manipulated, and contorted into giving only half the story. He says,

To get a real

...

In June, the economy dropped 467,000 jobs, bringing the official (U-3) unemployment rate up to 9.5%, its highest level since the recession of the early 1980's. In some ways this was a mirror image of the May report, which featured a relatively small decline in jobs (-322,000 revised from an original read of -345,000) but a big jump in the U-3 unemployment rate to 9.4% from 8.9% in April.June had a much bigger-than-expected loss of jobs (consensus was -367,000), but only a small 0.1% rise in the unemployment rate. The more comprehensive U-6 unemployment rate, which counts discouraged workers and those working part-time because they can't find full time jobs, also rose by 0.1% to 16.5%. A year ago the U-6 rate was 10.1%, so it is up 6.4 points, vs. a 3.9 point rise in the U-3 rate over the last year.The chart below ...

Long-suffering readers will be aware of our low opinion here at Notes of government economic statistics. The truth of the matter is that many of them are fudged. Don’t just take our word for it. According to Kevin Philips, former Republican Party strategist and author of Bad Money, “Ever since the 1960s, Washington has gulled its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics, the vital instruments with which the muscle and vitality of the American economy are measured.”

Take the Consumer Price Index, a widely used measure of inflation. It tracks inflation in part by comparing a basket of commonly consumed goods over the years.

Governments don’t like inflation. So they simply pull a fast one on Joe Public and swap the goods in the basket as it suits them. This from TradeSystemGuru.com’s Matt Blackman:

In an effort to keep inflation down and accentuate growth, statisticians shamelessly distort and manipulate the data. For example, the Consumer ...

Unemployment Numbers – Fake, or Really, Really Fake?

Ryan Cole, The Investment U Research Team

The latest unemployment numbers just came out, and they weren’t too good. Job losses, which had been slowing down for over a month, increased in speed again. The official unemployment rate, standing at 9.4%, looks set to increase when next released in early July.

But 9.4%, while bad, isn’t that bad, right?

After all, the Great Depression famously saw 25% unemployment at its height in 1932 and 1933. So this recession is bad, but nowhere near a depression… correct?

Sadly no.

You see, during the early years of the Clinton Administration, the way we measure unemployment changed. Discouraged workers – those waiting out the bad times – and the chronically unemployed – those who haven’t held a job in the past year – were

...

Unemployment his some groups harder than others The monthly jobs report was much better than expected. I will not go over the basic headline numbers, but if you want to see them go here. The picture is still pretty ugly, though, even if not quite as bad as had been feared, as shown in the graph below (from http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/). There is a lot of important data in the report that is generally not widely discussed. First is the disparate impact that this recession has had by gender. Men have been absolutely slammed by it, with the adult male unemployment rate now at 9.8%, up from 9.4% last month. The unemployment rate for women also increased by 0.4%, but only reached 7.5%. A year ago, the unemployment rates were almost the same between the sexes, at 4.8% for Women and 5.0% for Men. Adult men ...

We highlight General Motors Corp. (GM), Lear Corp. (LEA) and TRW Automotive Holdings Corp. (TRW). The April jobs report came in somewhat better than expected with a loss of "only" 539,000 jobs. Due to growth in the labor force, the total number of people who are unemployed rose by 563,000. This good news was offset by upward revisions to the February and March lost jobs figures, totaling 66,000. The unemployment rate rose to 8.9% from 8.5% in March (U-3). There was mixed news in the details of the report. On the plus side, the broader U-6 measure of unemployment, which includes discouraged workers and those working part time for economic reasons, only rose to 15.8% from 15.6% in March. This was a much smaller rise that we saw in either of the last two months (February, up 0.9 points, March up 0.8 points).

...