Daily Financial Crisis Capsule: Jobs Are Up But Unemployment Stays The Same. Why?

April 4th, 2010 - by: danny

CommonDreams.org: More Than 200,000 to Lose Jobless Benefits Monday With Congress Out

Under the jobless benefits program that ends Monday, Americans out of work are eligible for up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits. The program, aimed at helping jobless Americans stay afloat when new jobs aren’t readily available, gives an unemployed worker more than the 26 weeks of unemployment insurance normally available. But with the program ending, those out of work for as few as six months will see an interruption in their benefit checks.

“Odds are they have burned through savings, already asked for loans and gifts from family and friends if needed, so going for two weeks without a paycheck, especially if those two weeks are a time when rent or mortgage is due, is going to be hard,” Conti said.

Those who will miss unemployment checks may see them in the future. [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

Rollingstone.com Looting Main Street By Matt Taibi

How the nation’s biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt – meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff’s precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. “I’d be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning,” she says. “I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard – foreclosure, bankruptcy. I’d go to bed at night, and I’d be in tears.” [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

Meanwhile, during the fiasco known as Operation Iraqi Freedom … a blast from its past:

Daylight Robbery – Haliburton & Iraq “Quintessential War Profiteer” — It’s Cost Plus, Baby

Some time ago, BBC One Panorama investigated claims that as much as $23 billion may have been lost, stolen or not properly accounted for in Iraq. Alan “Congressman With Guts” Grayson is interviewed in the program because of his work successfully prosecuting war profiteers.

The Most Recent Jobs Report: Was it All That Positive?

The New York Times thought so headlining their story “Signaling Jobs Recovery, Payrolls Surged in March

Starting to reverse the loss of eight million jobs, American employers took on 162,000 more workers in March.”

Larry Summers Was Ecstatic

But Now The Administration is projecting another message according to Monday’s Washington Post:

Unemployment likely to linger as jobs grow

The increase in jobs highlighted in the nation’s most recent unemployment report carried the sound of economic promise, but Obama administration officials said Sunday that the public shouldn’t expect any dramatic improvement in the jobless rate…

BUT—Robert Reich Saw it as “NO JOBS RECOVERY” Unemployment Stayed the Same

The US economy added 162,000 jobs in March. Great news until you look more closely. In March, the federal government began hiring census takers big time. These are six-month temp jobs, and they tell us nothing about underlying trends in the labor market. It’s hard to gauge precisely how many were hired – probably between 100,000 and 140,000, although some estimates put the hiring as low as 48,000. Almost a million census workers will need to be hired over the next few months. Subtract these, and today’s job numbers are good but nothing to write home about.

EPI: Positive Job Growth, But Not Enough to Reduce Unemployment Rate

The release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report showed 162,000 payroll jobs gained in March, the largest jump in three years. However, of these, 48,000 were directly created by the federal government to assist with the 2010 Decennial Census. Excluding Census hiring, state and local government shed 9,000 jobs, while the private secto radded 123,000 jobs. Some of these gains were likely an upward correction to the winter-storm-dampened February payrolls, but the trend since January is positive, with the private sector adding an average of 65,500 jobs per month over the last two months. However, as nearly
400,000 workers entered or re-entered the labor market in March, the increase in payroll jobs was not enough to move the dial on unemployment, which held steady at 9.7%.

JOBS REPORT: “UGLY GOLDILOCKS?

Seeking Alpha: Non-farm payrolls didn’t contain any huge surprises this morning as total payrolls came in below expectations at 162k. The unemployment rate was steady at 9.7% and the U6 unemployment rose to 16.9% All in all, the report appears to be of the “ugly Goldilocks” sort — not too hot and not too cold, but just ugly enough under the surface to keep the liquidity pumps fully primed. This might have been the most highly forecast piece of data in the history of the market, but managed to surprise nonetheless. Stock futures rallied modestly on the news, but the dollar is soaring 0.7% against the euro so action on Monday could be mixed to positive.

Credit Writedowns: First of all, I’m not really stressed about the census workers issue. A lot of people have been subtracting them to get to the underlying trend of job growth. That exercise is fraught with peril. It may give you a read on where job growth is trending. However, it may mislead us because census jobs add income to the economy right now and that’s what is needed. Ultimately, what is important right now is that we see enough of a kick on employment in order to maintain cyclical factors like inventory builds which will overcome the threat of a double dip. So, when I see non-farm payrolls at +162,000. My initial reaction is positive.

Goldman is out with a note saying that the +162,000 was due mainly to the hiring of temporary census workers (48,000) and an improvement in weather. We’ll see next month if that is indeed true.

Huff Post: Top Fed Man Wants To Break up Big Banks

Simon Johnson Refutes Tim Geithner (BaselineScenario.com)

Speaking Thursday morning on the Today show, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner insisted on two points:

1. If the bank rescue of 2008-09 had been handled in any other way — for example, being tougher on bankers — the costs to the real economy would have been substantially higher.

“again, what was the choice the president had to make? He had to decide whether he was gonna act to fix [the banking system] or stand back because it might be more popular not to have to do that kind of stuff, and that would have been calamitous for the American economy, much, much worse than what we went through already.”

2. The reform legislation currently before Congress would end all concerns regarding Too Big To Fail in the future.

“The president’s not gonna sign a bill that doesn’t have strong enough teeth.”

In 13 Bankers, we disagree stronglyÃ¢â‚¬Â¦.

First and foremost, it is impossible to believe that the government could not have been tougher on banks and bankers in spring 2009. The idea that every failed top banker needed to keep his job — and that every director of a failed bank needed to stay in place — is simply preposterous.

Of course, the people who ran our biggest banks onto the rocks think they are indispensable, but as Charles de Gaulle reportedly said, “”The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.”
This is not about being vindictive. This is about holding people accountable

Jesse Jackson, Rangel Join Labor to Keep America Moving

A broad coalition of transportation labor, environmental, community and passenger advocate leaders launched a new national partnership — Keep America Moving — to rescue the nation’s financially distressed mass transit systems at a press conference at New York’s Penn Station March 31, 2010. Founding members of Keep American Moving, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, Transport Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelsen, ATU International President Warren George and TWU International President James C. Little articulated the plight of mass transit in America and the steps needed to fix the crisis at the event. Samuelsen kicked off the conference by decrying the loss of vital mass transit service and jobs in major urban and suburban centers across the country. “We are facing a national mass transit crisis,” said Samuelsen. “We need a national solution.”

RobertReich.org: The Fed in Hot Water

The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns — taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s bad loans — in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout.

The losses from those deals still total tens of billions, and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook. But the public never knew. There was no congressional oversight. It was all done behind closed doors. And the New York Fed — then run by Tim Geithner — was very much in the center of the action.

Max Keiser Attacks IMF for “Economic Slavery” in Greece

The News Dissector