The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think, page 1

Wall Street Journal

Here are 10 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:

- June's total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don't count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn't searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That's 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last report alone.

- The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler, closed hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

Even more info in the article..... more realistic than we have come to expect from most MSM sources.

Well it gets crazier ....
Yesterday Bank stock drove the Stock markets higher on news form an analyst "Meredith Whitney" who predicted Financials would increase 15% sounds like good news right?
in the same report is was predicted the U-3 Official unemployment rate would climb above 13%

So lets look at those numbers
U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate).......... In June was at 9.5%

The U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers...(Unofficial total) stood at 16.5%
DOL Report

Now if we bump those number to the suggested U-3 of 13+% that brings the U-6 up to if not over 25% the same as we saw during the Great Depression...

THings are as bad as I thought... and they will get worse than I feared


[edit on 14-7-2009 by DaddyBare]

reply to post by Spartak_FL

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I live in Cincinnati, you are seeing more and more of a Detroit like attitude here, are jobs are being packed up and sent overseas or to another part of the country. Construction as all but halted and police and firefighters are next on the list to go. Just tank the damn economy already so we can lynch you bastards and fix it our selfs.

Originally posted by poedxsoldiervet
reply to post by Spartak_FL

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tank the damn economy already so we can lynch you bastards and fix it our selfs.

This is some real talk right here.

Originally posted by poedxsoldiervet
reply to post by Spartak_FL

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I live in Cincinnati, you are seeing more and more of a Detroit like attitude here, are jobs are being packed up and sent overseas or to another part of the country. Construction as all but halted and police and firefighters are next on the list to go. Just tank the damn economy already so we can lynch you bastards and fix it our selfs.

People talk big, but in all honesty, if Joe Public were left in charge of the economy among other things, we'd tank back into the dark ages. Just look at a small selection of folks on the Internet. I shudder to think if any of these folks where in charge of anything important.

reply to post by CookieMonster09

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Im an RN and depending on what area of the country you work in Hospitals may be cutting nursing hours but not at my hospital. We are a level II trauma center in SoCal and we are VERY BUSY! Our unit is SWAMPED and at full capacity everyday. Hospitals will do whatever it takes to stay in business and they will cut hours and manpower but they CANNOT cut nursing. They are just too busy. We are not hiring any new nurses (poor new grads who thought nursing was the hot field) and all pay increases have been frozen. However, there is no way most hospitals can cut back in nursing hours. Hospitals are just too busy nowadays and nursing is the backbone of healthcare. What I'd love to see is nurses start to collectively band together and become stronger and give a nice middle finger to the healthcare industry after all those years of mistreatment, #ty wages, and #ty work conditions. A little karma if you will. As much as I want to get out of the profession I'm thankful to have a pretty secure job in this economy. But we nurses chose our profession for those very reasons, atleast I did. While my business friends went into the mortgage and finance industry with dreams of making it big I entered the trenches and garnered a real job.

reply to post by fleabit

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You have little faith in your country and its people then. Your average middle class town would be able to manage themselves and be productive just fine. I understand what you are saying but maybe people need the chance to prove themselves. If we sit there and bitch and complain about government and can't do any better maybe your right. But the town I live in we would manage just fine handling our own economy and governing ourselves.

reply to post by johnny2127

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The media is also failing to report on the hundreds of thousands of American's whose unemployment has run out or those that lost their jobs but were unable to draw benefits. Many many people are not counted because they use the people drawing unemployment benefits as a way to calculate the unemployment rate. In all reality I honestly believe the rate is around 18% and climbing but the government will never allow the media to report on this because they do not want to cause panic. When and if they do report the true numbers that is when SHTF.

reply to post by fleabit

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Well then let me ask you this.

When was the last time you were in debt over 10 trillion dollars?

Personally I've owed no one any money for at least 6 years now in fact many people owe me. But I don't bother to collect because I don't need it.

Don't see how anyone could do any worse.

Worse case scenario a drug cartel takes over the country and turns a profit selling trillions in drugs world wide. It's pretty sad that a drug cartel can make huge profits when a govt. whom takes 40+ percent of our earnings can't even pay off the interest on the money they borrowed. Much less have enough gonads to shut down the federal reserve and issue govt. currency at a fixed rate as opposed to just print more when you need it.

In fact it's worse than a drug cartel economically speaking. If the drug cartel sells bad drugs they are either going to go out of business or be killed. When the feds issue phony money that has no need to be backed by gold because it's digital currency and not paper they get richer off interest that has no backing to begin with. This leads to total control of the economic system because the govt. owes exponentially more even though it is not backed by say gold. And there is no paper currency to repay it in the first place because the paper currency was never issued.

This in return depletes the paper currency to a point that the govt. is forced to give more control to the fed. When you scratch my back I'll give you a buck but when I have to scratch yours you are required to give me 10.

It's the same original scheme just different people and different loop holes.

Put any average person off the street in control and they will make so much more money than they are now, they will have no need to be bribed because it would just be a waste of their time. I already have 10million I don't know what to do with why would I want another 500K? Where as the folks now in power think the more they have the better they are which is just media propaganda.

reply to post by fleabit

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Really? You don't think "Joe (and Jane) Public" are capable of fixing a damned mess created by dishonest politicians trained in 'business'. Now, I don't have a business degree, but I can think creatively.

So, here is a scenario. Instead of bailing out the 'hedge funds' (they aren't banks by the way), we create low interest loans for businesses. Small businesses with viable models, that produce something! Not webspace, not celebrity aggrandizement, but a real product.

Like a tracked robot that could be used to fight forest fires, a single pane solar cell that could run all the non essential electric appliances in your home (ie computers, cell phone chargers, tvs.), or a low cost electric trike for running around town (like an electric rickshaw). Or other 'grandiose' ideas of these pesky "J & J Publik" entrepreneurial types. You know, these massive failures like the PC, the light bulb, the internal combustion motor. Yeah, lets keep our eye on the prize, proppin' up bankers.

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