8 per 1000 is not enough

Initial unemployment claims dropped to “only” 450,000 and everybody is giddy as this is the third straight weekly drop, but,,, this is a Monday holiday week and that always creates under reporting and it will go back up next week. Continuing claims fell by 2000 and this too was pointed to as fantastic news but using the standard death rate of 8/1000/year applied to 4.5 million people about 700 of this reduction would be from claimants dying. Of course what is really happening is that the number of 99ers falling off the end eligibility is starting to exceed people coming onto the rolls.

The private sector reported adding 54,000 new jobs last month but mostly as temps since real jobs all go to China and India. Total employment dropped by 67,000 with most of the losses coming from the end of temporary Census jobs.  Even with more money from Congress to retain jobs, state and local government are cutting essential service jobs and are continuing the slow decline toward anarchy.

The popularly reported unemployment rate rose 0.1 to 9.6% edging toward the 10% number that Republicans claim will sweep them back into office. More troubling is that the more realistic rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics rose 0.2 to 16.7%.  A good guess of what that number really should be is hard to come by but is certainly over 20%.

In rust belt cities this number can be 50%. Even if new jobs were created at the highest rate we’ve seen since WWII replacing the 8 million jobs lost at the end of the Bush Administration would take many years. No policies have even been proposed that will recover any of these jobs, so let‘s see at 8 deaths per thousand/year, that‘s only 64,000/year; the death rate will need to go up.

The trade deficit declined slightly for July with increased exports of aircraft and manufacturing equipment. They didn’t say if this was new equipment or crated up factories being shipped out of the country. Imports declined slightly but this shouldn’t be seen as good news but a sign that we maybe starting a major decline in the retail sector.

Japan is upset with China buying up Japan’s government bonds as this is driving up the value of the Yen and putting Japan at a competitive disadvantage with exports. China has been selling US debt and not allowing its currency to float more than 1% against the USD despite promising that they would do allow this as the Yuan is overvalued by 40% compared to the USD. This gives Chinese goods an unfair advantage in the US market and makes it difficult to export to China even if they were to allow competition from US goods which they do not.

Oh well, when the Republicans get back in they will work on that insufficient death rate. Prior to Social Security the leading cause of death in cold weather was the elderly freezing to death and in warm weather it was the elderly dying from malnutrition. Those were the good old days of the free market, small government that the Republicans will return us to soon enough.
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