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Unemployment hits 9.4%
This time analysts are saying more bad news is actually sort-of good news. Unemployment may have jumped to 9.4% (the highest rate in a quarter of a century) but at least we only lost 345,000 jobs this month! This is the fewest we’ve lost in any month since September, and the fourth month that layoffs have declined.
Topic: Economy, WorldMagBlog
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back to top63 Comments to “Unemployment hits 9.4%”
Everybody else works for the Government….
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Unemployment stayed high (double this figure) under FDR’s socialist policies even up to a decade after the 1929 stock-market crash. Socialist policies also keep unemployment high in Europe to this day. And socialist policies are likely to keep unemployment rates high here too (even while our extravagant borrowing, taxing, spending and money printing will likely kick inflation up at the same time).
For some, the nose on the face is just too far away to perceive.
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9.4%?! Don’t you believe it!
Williams’ SGS site now shows U6 unemployment [uses pre-Clinton and -Reagan methodology] at over 16%, and estimates actual unemployment at over 20%.
Would you buy a used car from our federal government?!
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To all non-Oregon-residents: Our unemployment rate here is roughly 30% higher than the national average.
Count your blessings.
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Some hard numbers on the economy from a surprising source.
http://www.slate.com/id/2219599
We need to start making stuff again. And buying from ourselves. And protecting ourselves. I agree with one suggestion in the article–the other is more dubious.
And JM, if you think Obama wanted to spend the first two years of his presidency dealing with the worst economic crisis since the depression, then there is no point in discussing things. And if you have any suggestions for what he SHOULD be doing, instead of your ususal globalized regurgitative name calling, by all means let’s hear them. They certainly should not resemble those of our last President who bears a huge responsibility for the crisis.
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JOEL MARK (2): Unemployment stayed high (double this figure) under FDR’s socialist policies even up to a decade after the 1929 stock-market crash.
Frank: But why don’t you finish the story, Joel?
Namely, how FDR cut unemployment from 20% to just 1% with his statist policy of conscription — i.e., by drafting 10 million men out of the labor pool in to the military.
(I got this hunch that, while you abhor FDR’s “socialist” policies, you have zero problem with his statist policy of military conscription. Tell me I’m wrong.)
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“We need to start making stuff again. And buying from ourselves. And protecting ourselves.”
If this is so, and I agree, at least the part about making stuff, then why is Obama essentially raising the corporate tax rate by trying to close the loopholes. Doesn’t this discourage business and profitability? Doesn’t this encourage business to move somewhere else?
We need to encourage manufacturers, not discourage them.
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About making stuff again — my wife makes bread. In fact, I’m toasting a slice right now to eat with butter (no, not margarine) and honey.
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This actually is good news. I know my company, which laid off two people earlier this year, might be ready to hire soon. Looks like other companies might be in the same situation.
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Is it possible to lose your job, and yet gain your faith?
This blog explores that question:
http://www.redletterbelievers.blogspot.com/2009/06/losing-your-job-but-finding-your-faith.html
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In re: 7
Reagan did the same thing after the deflation left a budget defecit. He closed loopholes without officially raising taxes.
However, I do agree we need to encourage business. To do that the simple way, is for Obama to repeal all taxes corporate and income.
Eliminate the captial gains tax as well to ecourage investment.
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So much for Hope and Change. Many now have no hope and only change in their pocket.
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Arcadia, you are incredible, still trying to blame Bush for Obama’s shortcomings. The economic mess is exactly what Obama wants. That makes installing socialism easier. Geeeeezh
The mess is on Obama’s watch. Not Bush’s.
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Obama is the worst president the US has ever had.
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“They certainly should not resemble those of our last President who bears a huge responsibility for the crisis.”
So why does Obama play directly from the Bush handbook of splurging for bailouts, when it doesnt work?
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Arcadia,
The current economic decline is not as bad as the decline we faced during the Carter administration, in my view. We hasd most of all the same serious problems and also faced super high inflation back them too (although I think inflation will be coming to us too soon). And this decline was caused by irresponsibility and many levels (political and otherwise), including a corrupt (Dem led) congress since 2006 (when the economy was in great shape despite dealing with tragedies and two wars against terrorism). The current decline was especially triggered by polities and practices by politicians like Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. Far too many junk mortgages did a number on our economy and bad policies led to an increase of those junk mortgages and it spiraled.
Now, President Obama is bleeding a sick economy in all the wrong ways, making it worse in my view. And the current numbers reflect this view.
Arcadia, we should be empowering the private sector more, not the public sector. Without a stronger private sector, the public sector by necessity will also eventually dry up. We should also let failed companies and union-oppressed companies fail and take the lumps. Americans will then put back on their boot-straps and produce our way back to prosperity. Prosperity cannot be recovered by political posturing and printing new money, but by freeing up the private sector for progress from the bottom up (not the top down).
If we empower the public sector on the backs of a weakened private sector, then the house we build will be a house of cards.
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#6, Frank in Spokane wrote; “Tell me I’m wrong.”
You’re wrong.
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#17, Joel Mark: Tell me I’m right.
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JM,
Are you saying you OPPOSE military conscription?
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And when we suggested that we buy American when Bush was president, we were called — well, the conservatives know what we were called by the left. And now one of them has figured it out that we need a manufacturing base. But the left is in the process of destroying one of the last things we make: cars. No wonder the Germans like us more now. We’ll all have to buy VWs and Mercedes.
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Mark Roth,
You’re right!
(I also like honey ‘n’ butter on bread, the ‘made by your wife’ part is a RIGHT as it gets!).
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The left is destroying the car industry? They did that to themselves, quite nicely, thank you. Planned obsolescence, unplanned-for oil shocks, arrogance and hidebound management flying around the world in subsidized corporate jets took the largest corporation in the world into bankruptcy in just 25 years.
“Empower the private sector”. That’s a laugh right now. In case you hadn’t noticed, without a functional financial sector, the private sector withers and dies. Quickly. And the financial sector, thanks to decades of deregulation, was, and still remains on the verge of TOTAL COLLAPSE. Which is why we are spending/loaning them hundreds of billions.
Well, maybe we should “empower” the financial sector even more, right? Take all the evil government shackles off. We can have banks collapsing willy-nilly, Madoffs galore AIG’s, Countrywides, Lehmans and cratering hedge funds every month or so…
As for the “real” private sector, let’s “empower” them even more, too. Then they can ship more jobs overseas, stash those profits overseas and still enjoy the benefits of whatever is left of our system.
Right now, anyone who even hints at wanting to start a manufacturing business in this country is BESIEGED with offers and enormous incentives from cities, counties, and states across the country. The feds lavish tax incentives on them. It would be years before any new plant would pay a dime in taxes. Yet no one wants to do it. We simply can’t compete with $2.00 a day labor available in Asia, Mexico, wherever.
And when we allow those who are willing to work more cheaply into the country, the same folks who have been screaming “empower the private sector” start screaming “rape”.
All of that is why we need to PROTECT ourselves. We have the largest consumer base in the world, yet we allow our corporations and foreign manufacturers to undercut us, dump products, poison us, (and the planet), in the name of free markets and free trade.
We also have the best educated adult population in the world. Yet we choose to reward them and encourage them not to actually make things, but to devise ever more “creative” “financial products” intended to deceive others and make themselves obscenely wealthy.
We need to impose whopping tariffs on imports, alter the tax structures and incentive structures to reward job creation in this country, and, most importantly, as Obama has said, create entire new industries in this country. We’ve got the know-how, we’ve got the people, they just need a little help to know that they will be protected from the race-to-the-bottom and “all-earned-dollars-are-equal-in-value-to-the-country” attitudes that have run us off the rails.
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Arcadia, you write a lot of garbage.
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“The left is destroying the car industry? They did that to themselves, quite nicely, thank you.”
Oh. I guess the unions are primarily Republicans then?
I don’t think so……
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How does a person prosper? A “can do” attitude, hard work, continuous learning, and trustworthiness. How can the government assist? Mainly by protecting a person’s life, liberty, and the fruits of his labor.
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Monty: Thank you for your constructive criticism.
John Denny: Sadly, ensuring that person’s trustworthiness must also be high on the government’s list. See Mr. Mozillo below.
And equally sadly, lots of people chose to prosper by exploiting others’ weaknesses or powerlessness.
The greatest mistake we make in this country is to assume that when a few prosper mightily, it is good for the rest of us. Yes, there must be incentives, but there must also be controls.
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Yeah, I’m gonna be staying at work a little late today just so that I look indispensible.
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“Well, maybe we should “empower” the financial sector even more, right? Take all the evil government shackles off. We can have banks collapsing willy-nilly, Madoffs galore AIG’s, Countrywides, Lehmans and cratering hedge funds every month or so…”
Madoff, along with some other CEOs have definately committed criminal acts. They are being prosecuted for them. They were not deregulated instances.
There are plenty of CEOs who did not, and did not leverage like a casino.
Being afraid to lose big companies, is like being afraid to invent and use the cotton gin….
“Planned obsolescence, unplanned-for oil shocks, arrogance and hidebound management flying around the world in subsidized corporate jets took the largest corporation in the world into bankruptcy in just 25 years.”
I’m not sure how corporate jets is the issue. If they flew commercial, theyd be paying 500 to 2k a seat at least. Plenty of other companies have corporate jets and have not gone bankrupt. It also employes many jobs in the jet manufacturing business.
The issue isnt regulation. Criminal type acts like Madoff will be found and prosecuted…those that arent usually fail eventually anyway, such as the high leveraged companies off their rocker like AIG.
If you want incentive for American industry..remove all taxes across the board, and let Americans chose where to invest.
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Arcadia,
You say, “ensuring that person’s trustworthiness must also be high on the government’s list.”
Which person? Every person who would strive to be successful?
“Sorry, kid. Before being promoted to assistant night manager here at McDonald’s of Podunk City, you must pass the local authorities trustworthiness check, even though I’ve known you and your family since before you were born and I already trust you with this restaurant I’ve owned for 30 years.”
You say, “lots of people chose to prosper by exploiting others’ weaknesses or powerlessness”.
For instance? Are you talking about hiring illegal aliens? or con artists like Madoff? or ???
Or are you saying that because I know how to repair a bicycle, that I would be exploiting someone else’s weakness and powerlessness by charging that person to fix their bicycle, which they can’t fix themselves because of their ignorance of mechanical things or lack of tools or motivation?
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Restatement of the headline:
“Unemployment his a 26-year low!”
Thank goodness that Ronald Reagan was newly on the scene to turn that low around back then.
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#23 Arcadia,
That post is right on target. We do need to rethink our trade policy and stop rewarding companies who take their manufacturing to China and other countries for cheap labor then expect to import the products free of tariffs to sell to us. Local businesses can’t compete with that. But I’m not sure that this is an issue either party has been willing to address for many, many years. I hope Obama will.
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John Denney: And if that McDonalds manager, at the behest of corporate management decides that the kid is now an “executive” and can be worked 60 or 70 hours a week while being on a fixed “salary” of 16K per year, you bet the government should be watching. It’s a violation of the wage-hour law. And if the kid decides poaching on the female fry clerks is his right…
And no, being paid to repair a bicycle is not exploitation. Unless you have no idea what you are doing and haven’t been on or even seen a bike since your last tricycle.
There are lots of weaknesses, lots of ways to exploit them and lots of people willing to do so for a buck. Most of the Christians on this blog know that, but forget all about it when somebody waves the flag of baseball, apple pie, and capitalism.
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Arcadia, you really need to rethink all of your socialist thoughts. Your posts are full of wrongful logic and ill chosen words. You are one of the reasons that the US hired the lying socialist who has shamed this country so mightily. You are so wrong that it will take a long time to show you how your logic is convoluted. But make no mistake, you are wrong wrong wrong. . Now think about it:!:
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Verbosity, Verbosity, Verbosity, Arcadia. The post #23 was nine paragraphs, 433 words. And they were all Koo Wap
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“ensuring that person’s trustworthiness must also be high on the government’s list”
Well said komrade… Let’s start another socialist bureaucracy to moniter every citizens trustworthiness, while we steal everyone’s future…
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Didn’t the administration say that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8%?
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Montyfisherwoof, that really isn’t a constructive use of the blog. Show how a specific point or two is wrong–you haven’t given anything at all to “think about,” just a command to do so.
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Joel Mark at #17: Call me a cab!
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#33
Arcadia,
I find it most amusing that your view seems to be that most people are evil and need government to monitor them closely, while my original post had posited trustworthiness as a key to success.
The root problem is not that we don’t have enough government oversight, but that we the people are becoming unrighteous and untrustworthy. As one of the Founding Fathers said, our form of government is only suitable for a moral people.
In bumper stickerese: Control yourself or someone else will.
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I don’t see how the two ideas of trustworthiness and “men are evil” are especially opposed. In practice, we take both to be true. Trust is one of the elements needed for any social relationship, such as employment. Yet Calvinists that some of us are, we know that folks often look for their own advantage — all the more when we step outside our own communities.
One of the great virtues of a more decentralized system is that you have multiple players each checking the other. Most of the time this works well. (Adam Smith would be so proud). Yet, the reality is that this freedom can go awry — it has in the past, and by all lights did so now. That’s where regulation plays an important part. By putting some boundaries on behavior, it can level the playing field and so enable parties to trust one another.
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Level the playing field? What an odd way of describing trustworthiness.
Freedom didn’t go awry in this case, it was infringed upon. The government mandated banks make loans to people whom the banks did not consider trustworthy. Turns out, the banks were right, but they were not free to exercise their business decisions to deny loans.
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John Denny wrote; “The root problem is not that we don’t have enough government oversight, but that we the people are becoming unrighteous and untrustworthy.”
Spot on.
And when a country does impose more oversight and control to “solve” the problem of an under-trustworthy populace, we just end up with a heavier handed gov’t on a people who are every bit as untrustworthy as before. And such a gov’t only tends to attracts more and more untrustworthy candidates and leaders.
No, gov’t is NOT the ultimate answer. The solution MUST run deeper than that. The “system” is not the problem. Sin is and sin can thrive and grow in any “system” or “ism.”
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Nobody said it clearer than Ronald Reagan: “If virtue goes, the government fails.” (radio address, July 9, 1979).
And that can go for ANY government.
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In the absence of regulations—laws that let companies know the boundaries of what is ‘freedom’ and what is unfair and unlawful—we will not have a sustainable economy. We are innately sinful and without the clear boundaries of just laws, companies will act unjustly.
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41
The government mandated banks make loans to people whom the banks did not consider trustworthy. Turns out, the banks were right, but they were not free to exercise their business decisions to deny loans.
Sadly for your argument, this is not supported by the empirical evidence. Default rates were lower on these loans than for the general public. Likewise, as the bubble grew to its bursting point, the banks were basically channeling as many as possible into these alt-a mortgages. Nah, can’t blame the poor or the legislation on this one. A number of responsible economists have noted that a failure to monitor this financial engineering is one of the significant reasons for the failure to properly assess the risk (and so the collapse).
This is an instance where more regulation may actually help. By increasing transparency in the system, the regulation helps make it more competitive, lessening the role of insiders. It was this sort of transparency, or the ability of players to participate that I was thinking of when I used the term “leveling the playing field.”
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Harris: Not to mention, the law in fact didn’t require banks to make loans to poor risks. It only banned “redlining,” the practice of denying loans to everyone from certain areas based on demographics. When the law (the Community Reinvestment Act) was passed in 1977, it was common for lenders to simply decide to deny all loan applications from certain areas, regardless of the creditworthiness of the individual applicant.
The CRA said that you can’t deny a loan to someone with acceptable credit simply because of the neighborhood he lives in. Far from “mandat[ing] banks make loans to people whom the banks did not consider trustworthy,” the law specifically said all loans should be consistent with sound banking practices.
Here is a good article on it. However, I’ve mostly given up trying to convince anyone, even with the ample documentation that the notion John Denney perpetuates is not correct. It simply serves the conservative cause better to pretend Democrats forced banks to make bad loans.
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DJ, no one is talking about the “absence” of regulations.
Also, our founders were huge advocates of “limited” gov’t, but that never meant no gov’t in their minds. The debate has always been on the extent of and reasonableness of regulations, and the value we place on freedom and fairness in the marketplace and how to sort that tention out wisely.
America is strongest when she applies her politics mostly to preserving freedoms and applies her faith & culture to preserving fairness.
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The less faith and virtue among the people, the less we can trust genuine freedom and liberty. I love liberty and am willing to trust it profoundly, but I went into ministry (not politics) because I beleived that is where the foundations of virtue are best laid in people and nations; moral foundations that make true liberty possible and more beneficial to all.
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Joel Mark
I read an analyst’s report of Citigroup in Marketwatch in Jan. 2008. He said the top management behaved “more like gunslingers than top management.” But he went on to rate the stock as a solid buy anyway. These guys have been running amuck unchecked and almost entirely deregulated for years and years and years.
I do agree with you about the importance of virtue and a solid moral foundation. I respect those who fight for those things regardless of vocation. Some fight for in in ministry, as you do, and some fight for it in the city halls and courts, or the factories where they work, or in the businesses they manage or own.
But freedom should never be used as an excuse for licentiousness. When it is, we should expect that laws and regulations will be implemented to drastically curtail the freedom of the offending party, whether it’s an individual, a company or an entire industry. And leaving the concept of fairness in the hands of faith and a corrupt culture is, in my opinion, dodging our responsibility in that regard.
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#46 & 47
So, SteveG, Harris,
Where did all the toxic loans come from, then?
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John Denney: Securitization.
In summary, here’s what caused the mess we’re in now, or at least part of it: For a long time, lenders have bundled mortgages and other debt instruments into securities and sold them to institutional investors (pension plans, insurance companies, etc.) The buyer would make the larger but slower profit as borrowers repaid with interest, the original lender gets a quick profit and a fresh inflow of capital with which to make more loans.
However, during the housing boom that started a few years ago, it become more and more attractive to some unscrupulous lenders to extend credit to people who really could not afford it (usually enticing them with short-term teaser rates on adjustable rate mortgages), intending to bundle the bad loans in with some good ones and sell them off. The buyers often didn’t know exactly what kinds of loans they were getting, and the lenders became less worried about ensuring the borrower could pay the loan back, because by the time the interest rate increased, it would no longer be the lender’s problem.
You might think the law would catch up with such unscrupulous lenders; and you’d be right, it is beginning to. But for a while it looked like a good scheme.
So where did the toxic loans come from? Human greed.
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Clarification: In #52, where I said, The buyers often didn’t know exactly what kinds of loans they were getting, I am referring to the investors who buy the securities packages.
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The bad loans did largely come from bad political policies & pressures on banks to get the money out fast and furious. The banks should have tightened up their standards but politicians especially were doing all they could to resist than notion so that home sales would flourish on their watch.
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DJ wrote, “freedom should never be used as an excuse for licentiousness.”
The alleged abuse of freedom is NOT a good argument against it as the primary priority for us as Americans. Any abuse of freedom should be dealt with on it’s own merits justly, but it should not be some ideological pretext for a new system or political “ism” that begins to break down our rights and freedoms.
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More on where the bad loans came from.
(Joel: You’re wrong. Read the linked article, please.)
An excerpt:
Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”
“We just went right after them,” said Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
Why would they want to entice people who could qualify for prime loans into subprime? Because the interest rates are considerably higher, leading to more profits when they sell the loans — never mind the harm it does to the buyers when they default.
Joel: They could have extended the loans to these borrowers without going to subprime. No “political policies and pressures” made them push those borrowers into subprime.
At the heart of such charges is reverse redlining, specifically marketing the most expensive and onerous loan products to black customers.
The New York Times, in a recent analysis of mortgage lending in New York City, found that black households making more than $68,000 a year were nearly five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as whites of similar or even lower incomes. (The disparity was greater for Wells Fargo borrowers, as 2 percent of whites in that income group hold subprime loans and 16.1 percent of blacks.)
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DJ, you write as if I’m not aware of management misbehaviors. But are you not aware of government misbehavior? When we empower the gov’t to OVER-regulate industries and businesses, we are not putting purer people in charge. We are, often, motivating those misbehaving businesses to find other ways to cheat or other politicians to buy off. They must be dealt with legally and justly on the demerits of their misbehavior.
Political policies will nt fix misbehavior. When you use heavy-handed gov’t, it soon becomes only a matter of who has the most power and the misbehvior goes on.
No economic system or approach to governing will work if the inside-out virtue of the people goes to heck. And it is going to heck these days. My point is that socialism is by no means a rescue plan (though Obama is presenting it as such).
It is the remaining decent and honest industries, businesses and managers that also suffer from heavy-handed regulation and politics and that is a shame.
DJ, you definitely misunderstood my point about leaving fairness in the hands of faith and a corrupt culture. I mean that politicians are as (or MORE) inept and proven incapable of exacting fairness as any other resource, legal or otherwise. If faith is undermined, then our best resource for instilling fairness in our culture is undermined. And a bunch of new laws won’t fix it.
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SteveG,
Thank you for that explanation. The activity you described compounded the problem, but does not seem to be the sole cause.
Here’s Walter Williams on the issue, referencing Thomas Sowell’s book. Both are black, so you’d think they’d be sensitive to red-lining.
Again, the issue of trustworthiness arises. Borrowers of their loan officers, buyers of mortgage backed securities of the sellers, and our news sources and politicians in describing what happened.
The article to which you had linked earlier was written in 2006, before the crisis happened. Republicans had raised the issue of the pending collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but Barney Frank said they were in fine shape. Maybe Barney read that same article.
We have a crisis of trust and trustworthiness.
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John: I will say, I think the Clinton-era enforcement of CRA pushed too far, and while it’s still not true to say, as Williams does, that the law required banks to make loans to people with poor credit, fear of government penalities probably gave them incentive to do so.
That pushed housing prices up — because with more people able to get loans, the demand rose — and that made the securitization scheme begin to look, to some lenders, like an attractive way to make a lot of profit fast. However, there own greed took over and led them to go far beyond anything the law could possibly have required.
So there’s a combination of factors and the government is part of it. I don’t dispute that; I very much do dispute the assertion that it’s all the fault of the Democrats.
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grr. their own greed. I do know grammar, honest.
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I know you do, Steve.
And, yes, untrustworthiness is not limited to just Democrats.
Another flaw of regulation is the law of unintended consequences. The “mark to market” accounting rule was established to prevent Enron style accounting, requiring assets to be valued not at what you say they’re worth, but what you could actually sell them for on the street. So then later a company buys a billion dollar mortgage backed security. Later still, when they’re about to file their annual report, it comes out that their security is tainted with toxic mortgages, and no one is buying them. So now they have to report a loss of a billion dollars, even though that asset may be actually worth $950 million. So that one well-intentioned accounting change exacerbated the country’s financial problems.
America got along fine without the ‘mark to market’ rule just fine until the Enron executives indulged in the rising tide of untrustworthiness, which is the real problem.
There are two styles of raising children. One imposes innumerable rules to address a child’s behavior. Typically, the rules are abandoned in the parents absence. The other style instills a few fundamental attitudes, making rules unnecessary, and life in general much more pleasant, and the attitudes tend to stay for life.
America seems to be abandoning the fundamental attitudes that made us great, requiring more rules to make us behave.
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America seems to be abandoning the fundamental attitudes that made us great, requiring more rules to make us behave.
No argument there.
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So, guess we’re just a couple of fundamentalists, then, eh?
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