Friday, July 6, 2012

Unemployment Continues

The reports again seem dire. The unemployment is still listed at 8.2% and we are entering the mid summer season. Labor Day is the semi official start of the campaign and we still have no leadership. So here we go with the data:

As usual we start with the Romer Curve. By now we should have had a rip roaring economy. In fact the difference between doing nothing and the Stimulus would almost begin to be negligible. But we know the truth. Clueless.
The above are her errors. One can see the ever growing disparity between reality and what she predicted. Will anyone ever admit this fact? Doubtful.
Now we have the percent of population employed as the denominator. We can see it has actually dropped a nit. Thus real unemployment has gone up! Not remained constant. namely they have taken people out of the workforce again! Otherwise we would have seen 8.4% or more.
This is the data on the gap. We are growing marginally.
But the above is the telling curve. We have a growing potential workforce based upon the green line. Namely each month new potential workers enter the potential workforce. Thus just to stand still we must add 150,000-180,000 new jobs a month. That just keeps us at 8.2%. But we are adding far fewer, thus the negative gap, the red line, shows we are negative for the past two months.

As I have said before, I believe we may have already entered another recession. The GDP will be of interest but it is for Q2 only.