Wall Street is celebrating as the April jobs report, which was expected show that some 75,000 jobs had been cut, reported that only 20,000 were lost. I bet those 20,000 and the quarter million cut in the three previous months can hardly contain their joy.
However, The King of Simple isn’t all that overjoyed, because like usual, the main stream media reports what they are given; government statistics.
And, you know what they say about statistics; Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. ─ Aaron Levenstein
So taking the cue once more and being a half empty glass sort of guy, shall we look at the other half of the statistics? The U.S. doesn’t add jobs fluidly to our economy; jobs are added at a disproportionately higher rate in spring and summer.
In April, Manufacturing employment fell by 46,000 over the month; nearly all the decline occurred in durable goods manufacturing. While manufacturing is in my opinion the most important of our economic indicators, it should also be added that all previous recessions and depressions were preceded by a drop in durable goods manufacturing.
As a little recap of an article that I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the problem is not that we lost 270,000 jobs in the last four months; the problem is that on average, we should have added 180,000 jobs per month…just to stay even with job seekers!
In other words, the total jobs added should have been around 900,000 not 270,000 jobs lost. Put these two numbers together and you have 1,170,000 people who aren’t’ one bit happy. Okay, Wall Street is happy, but no honest people are.
It gets worse. As I recently reported, some 5 Million people are going to graduate from college, high school, trade schools or have dropped out of the education system and will be looking for work…next month.
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