Initial weekly unemployment claims increased to 427,000, a 1,000 increase in a week. Additionally, last week was revised up to 426,000, from 422,000. The 4 week moving average is 424,000. A weekly average above 400,000 does not indicate job growth and we now have a pattern of initial unemployment insurance claims going backward, the wrong direction for jobs.
Our nation has serious economy problems, but the "cause" is a corrupt political system as opposed to political ideology. If our politicians were not on the payroll of the Fat Cats that fund their elections -- through campaign bribes -- they'd fix these economy woes in a heartbeat.
But they were PAID TO create unemployment to drive wages down and corporate profits and CEO wealth UP! Think NAFTA and Glass-Steagall.
A week ago we outlined here how and why Ben Bernanke lost a significant vote in the recent Fed Open Market Committee meeting. The vote was not so much to launch immediately QE3 when QE2 comes to an end this month; it was to keep Quantitative Easing as a tool in the Fed’s arsenal of monetary weapons. So far, the mainstream media have not yet realized how significant a shift this is in Fed policy, but other bloggers are beginning to notice, and so is the stock market. Yesterday Chairman Bernanke spoke at the International Monetary Conference in Atlanta, at which he made no mention of Quantitative Easing now or down the road sometime. The stock market certainly reacted to this omission; having traded noticeably higher during the day, the Dow Jones industrial average closed down 19 points, losing most of its ground in the last fifteen minutes of the session when Bernanke began speaking.
Here are some perceptive comments about the speech from Cullen Roche on his Pragmatic Capitalism website:
*His speech was certainly market moving and as reports of the speech hit the wires the equity markets began to reverse on fears that QE3 is off the table. But there was a more interesting tone in his speech today than we’ve seen in the past. The Chairman was exceptionally defensive. In fact, the entire speech is basically an explanation as to why QE2 did not hurt the economy (of course it did).
JOLTS stands for Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The April report shows there were 4.6 official unemployed people hunting for a job to every position available. There were only 2,972,000 job openings for April 2011 and a -4.8% drop from the previous month. Below is the graph of job openings per the official unemployed.
We can draw several clear conclusions from the indictment of John Edwards.
The case is a joke, quite literally. It mocks justice.
The cast of characters consists of people who should have recused themselves, rather than bringing a prosecution. This strange case has the faint odor of the nonstop assault on former Alabama governor, Don Siegelman.
Apparently the Department of Justice has a lot of time on its hands. How else could it pursue this transparent nonsense while failing to prosecute the perpetrators of the financial collapse?
Finally, the prosecution shows that those in control are not even pretending to acknowledge a rule of law.
Austan Goolsbee, Obama's top economic adviser will step down. Couldn't have anything to do with that dismal jobs report now could it?
This leaves only Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner as the last remaining original Obama appointee. Of course G.E. is still there, although the offshore outsourcer left along with Larry Summers.
Larry Summers, former director of the White House National Economic Council, stepped down at the end of last year to return to his teaching job at Harvard University.
Christina Romer, his predecessor as CEA chair, left last August, also to return to academia, and Peter Orszag resigned as White House budget director last July.
While Goolsbee was better than others, unfortunately he stayed in denial on the trade deficit. He also denied the jobs crisis to the point of proclaiming this month as a bump in the road to recovery. Literally the BLS commissioner had to correct him as well as others echoing such feel good don't worry sentiment, indirectly. Sorry folks, the BLS says the pathetic jobs data is not due to weather. The jobs crisis is clearly not a blip, not a bump in the road.
The United States Population has the largest percentage of foreign born since 1920, including 10.8 million illegal immigrants and the Supreme Court is taking 'em on. SCOTUS just ruled the lower courts must re-examine their ruling on Hazelton Pennsylvania's laws to verify renters and workers are there legally.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigators may issue a public rebuke of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and its former executives instead of suing them for actions that led to the firm’s 2008 failure
How Stupid Can America Be? Pretty damn stupid according to a new report by the United States International Trade Commission. In 2009, the United States lost $48 billion dollars and 923,000 jobs due to brazen theft by China. Yet, companies routinely think the great answer is to manufacture in China, due to lower costs.
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