Unemployment falls below 9%

Muldur said:
It's not about Obama, or Bush, Clinton, or any other individual President for that matter. It's about the disconnect between the real economy and Wall Street.

Your sort of thinking was the prevalent theory in "the market" right up until the bottom fell out in 08, despite several other major downturns going back more than 10 years.

The "trend" of the market (led mostly by financial stocks) continued to soar based on the rapidly inflating "bubble" in real-estate prices and the related spending and loan spree based on home-equity.

Meanwhile, 100s of 1000s of jobs were being destroyed outright or shipped overseas as the REAL economy continued it's decline in real terms. Sooner or later, reality overtook fantasy and the market crashed.
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You're not making a very good case. Indeed you're saying the market matches economic health. Obviously, nobody says that a good stock market indicates that things will always be good, but is is a pretty good "instant indicator" of how things are going at the moment. Not perfect, but pretty good.
 
Tricky said:
You're not making a very good case. Indeed you're saying the market matches economic health. Obviously, nobody says that a good stock market indicates that things will always be good, but is is a pretty good "instant indicator" of how things are going at the moment. Not perfect, but pretty good.
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And again, it's just one of several indicators that have been cited in this thread of a slow but steady recovery.
 
Tricky said:
Incorrect. A lot of these skills are not taught on the job. They are taught in vocational education classrooms. Some are taught by specialized institutes. But you sure as hell don't do OJT when one mistake could blow up a rig. I'm sure there are some welding jobs that you can do with OJT, but certainly not all.
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If I have two sections of a major steel job and I am welding them together, and I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, one of two things happen;

1. I ruin the piece.
2. I make a weld that somebody else needs to come and fix because the X-rays show it to be full of voids.

There is no

3. The piece gets welded properly and I get paid.

Because it isn't simple to make a good weld. Not at all. Even the limited arc welding I do took weeks of welding scrap and reading books on welding until I could do a half-way decent job that would hold the weight it was meant to.
 
BenBurch said:
No. That is quite a different case. When ONLY the rich get richer, the amount of spending in the country does not rise that much, and the result is not prosperity, it is a class divide.

Trickle-down is the asinine theory that if you give Mitt Romney even LESS tax to pay that Mitt Romney is going to make jobs and buy things in sufficient proportion to raise the estate of those without his sinecures. It just does not work that way.
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Tricky said:
Again, let me barge in on your discussion with Ben. Trickle-down involves making the rich even richer and hoping that some of it will make it to the poor and middle class. A general increase in the health of an economy (such as a stock-market jump) often ties directly with the poor and middle class. Stocks mostly go up because they have a lot of people working and cranking out widgets, or because consumers have money and are buying their products.
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OK accepted--I wasn't aware how specific "trickle down" was to top-rate tax cuts.
 
Francesca R said:
Metrics, schmetrics. One could look at the civilian employed/population ratio. Regardless of whether people want a job (which is determined in part by how hard it is to find one and what the competing alternatives are), this probably better measures a good bit about how the burden of supporting the economy is shared, and thus how easy it is to support the economy (ex capital asset growth, net exports, other stuff.)

And no it doesn't measure hours worked, hourly earnings, part time/full time or anything like that.

And I didn't put the Y-axis origin at 54%, the St Loius Fed did--call them lairs with stats not me :)

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/127464f3058928005a.jpg

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO
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Krugman has been argueing for using employment-population ratio for prime-age adults:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/is-the-labor-market-actually-improving/
 
And he states that this is to ex-out the demographic effect of a shrinking labour force, which is necessary to keep in there to measure "how the burden of supporting the economy is shared, and thus how easy it is to support the economy (ex capital asset growth, net exports, other stuff.)" as I mention in that post.

Obama is, of course, not responsible for demographics, and Krugman is writing a political column not an economics one. But demographics affect how easy it is for the economy to grow, and politicians will be judged on that in one way or another.
 
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Francesca R said:
Obama is, of course, not responsible for demographics, and Krugman is writing a political column not an economics one. But demographics affect how easy it is for the economy to grow, and politicians will be judged on that in one way or another.
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You seem to be arguing out of both sides of your mouth--that Obama ought not be held responsible for changing demographics, but that he probably will be anyway.

In fact, as I mentioned earlier, most voters will probably rely on the unemployment rate as reported in the mainstream media. So if we're only talking about political effects, I think that's the one metric that will trump all others.

If we're talking about actual responsibility, then the issue is a lot more complex and nuanced (and Obama probably has little to do with the behavior of the economy anyway). I would still rely on the overall picture that the various indicators point toward. And I think they're converging on the fact that we are in a very slow but now sustained recovery period.
 
Obama might not be (held responsible). The demographic pull to insolvency (facing many mature economies) is slow burning and I have no idea when it starts seriously impacting policy choices.

I've no intention of arguing a partisan viewpoint. The headline unemployment rate probably will matter most in 2012 to voters. That doesn't mean it matters most in every economic sense.
 
Francesca R said:
The headline unemployment rate probably will matter most in 2012 to voters. That doesn't mean it matters most in every economic sense.
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I'd agree with that.

However, I think at least right now the picture given by the unemployment rate meshes well with the picture given by the majority of significant economic indicators.
 
Francesca R said:
Obama might not be (held responsible). The demographic pull to insolvency (facing many mature economies) is slow burning and I have no idea when it starts seriously impacting policy choices.

I've no intention of arguing a partisan viewpoint. The headline unemployment rate probably will matter most in 2012 to voters. That doesn't mean it matters most in every economic sense.
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Next to general economic news and unemployment numbers, I'd suspect people are probably influenced by personal experience. And seeing someone drop out of the workforce because of retirement, won't reflect badly on Obama, in contrast to people of prime-age becoming unemployed or not finding a job.
 
Muldur said:
Determined "to the person"? Perhaps not, but it can be estimated with reasonable accuracy.
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I meant it can't be determined just from the statistic you were talking about (the labor participation rate), but it can be estimated based on other analyses.

The BLS does track other measures based on these analyses, including the U-6 measurement that I've already posted about, which attempts to include the number of people who have given up looking for jobs and people who have part time jobs but would like to have full time jobs.

However, even the U-6 numbers have been edging downward the past few months by roughly the same rate as the regular unemployment rate that is most often cited.

-Bri
 
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Housing starts were up 1.5% in January.

These "Leading Economic Indicators" (SPL, TLT, USO, GLD) were all up modestly. The conclusion from that source was, "The U.S. economy continues to improve, however slowly, and remains at risk from Europe, high unemployment and a skittish consumer."

So again, I think the overall picture is that many indicators are converging on the same picture: a modest, tenuous but real recovery.
 
WildCat said:
And once you train them you have welders. If employers are waiting for welding to become part of the high school curriculum to train their specialized workers for free they'll be waiting a long, long time.
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Time was, they did teach welding in high school. Now they are too busy training them to take a test that just funnels money into the pockets of a few corrupt families.

At any rate, 7 ads in a metro area of 8 million doesn't seem like a shortage to me. I also wonder what the employers complaining about a shortage are paying their welders?
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So it is greedy bosses that cause the shortage of welders.
 
BenBurch said:
If so, there are a number of professional welding schools existing for no reason at all, and a lot of vocational programs at community colleges that are wastes of taxpayer's money.
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When I got out of trade school, I thought I knew it all. A week working in an actual production shop showed me I'd barely scratched the surface. After a month I knew more than all the years of school had taught me.
 
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Muldur said:
Which proves that "the market" can not be trusted to provide a true and accurate portrayal of the health of the real economy.
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And is there anyone suggesting that we rely only on a measure of the health of the stock market to characterize the health of the economy?

I started this thread talking about the unemployment rate (not a measure of stock market performance), and I've mentioned a number of other measures that all point to the same general picture: a very slow and fragile but now sustained recovery.
 
Time for a reality check. The DJIA is not an accurate measure of the US equities market due to the way the stocks are chosen and the index is calculated.

If you are going to talk about the market, us a more rational index such as the S&P 500.
 
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