The story:
…For the past 5 1/2 months, the initial unemployment claims data have not really changed…
…The data are oscillating about a slowly increasing value, indicating that, if anything, unemployment claims are increasing. That means that for the past 5 1/2 months, every time the administration has told us that the unemployment situation is slowly recovering, and that the data show “the right trend,” they have been absolutely mistaken.
The media has been doing their typical baby duck analysis: every day is a brand new day, every unemployment claims report is the first one they’ve ever seen. So we get headlines like, “job situation improving” when the number of claims drops, and “unexpected increase” when the number rises…
If you click on the link, there is a chart which clearly shows this. To put the brightest face on it, there has been no improvement, at all. A more worrisome aspect is that the trend line is, indeed, slightly upwards…which means that, overall, employment continues to decrease in the United States.
While employment is a lagging indicator, if we were in a genuine recovery we should see at least some improvement in the employment picture. All we’ve seen is some smoke and mirrors – or, at best, numbers just misunderstood.
Until we start getting men like him back to work, we’re going nowhere.
