What recovery?

[Crazy Dave]

:shrug:

[Tansy_Gold]

1. The one that half of DU thinks arrived yesterday. n/t

[Crazy Dave]

2. My neighbor down the street who just lost his house should be thrilled to hear...

...that things are so great.

Actually I should say my former neighbor. One of the banks that we bailed out kicked he and his family out two weeks ago.

[Tansy_Gold]

11. I have three neighbors in similar straits.

One is so far underwater he's just turning the house and contents over to the bank.

One actually has enough equity that he hopes to be able to sell at current market and pay off the mortgage. He'll start from scratch after paying 12 years on a 30 year fixed rate.

Third is struggling with bank because bank does NOT want to repossess the property, but owner hasn't made a payment in five months. His wife lost her job and can't find anything at all; his hours were cut last fall from 45/wk to 20.

Property a few blocks away that I almost bought in '06 for $368K (they were asking $405K) was offered as a short sale in February at $145K, but bank turned down an offer two weeks ago at $150K. It's currently listed at $171K.


But happy days are here again!

:sarcasm:


Tansy Gold

[dmallind]

21. By which "logic"

if my neighbor just got hired at a high level job for major money there is no unemployment and underemployment.

There is a reason sensible people rely on data rather than anecdotes about their neighbors to judge aggregate trends and conditions.

I have yet to see one DU post incidentally claiming that a recovery is complete or close to it, but as more and more data come in in positive directions, I see a lot of doomers who claimed recovery was impossible start shifting the goalposts and building some pretty big strawmen.

[Crazy Dave]

25. Right now...

I don't see things getting worse. That would be hard to imagine, but I do see this as the new "normal" for many more years to come.

[Newest Reality]

3. The one you keep hearing about!

What, you expect substance in this culture when the Simulation of media offers an endless regurgitation and synthesis as hyper-real?

The "recovery" means the obscenely wealthy are in better shape, personally and concerning their massive holdings. You must share in their joy, good capitalists! Bow your head in reverence and simply ... believe!

The "recovery" is like the American Dream, go to sleep and I'm pretty sure you have a good chance at seeing it.

Heck, these days the perception is all that matters.

[jody]

4. The commercial real estate market has not reached bottom. I believe none of the job recovery crap.

[seabeckind]

5. Welcome to Walmart....

The chinese drywall is being phased out in our building materials department. We'll be charging the taxpayers for our inconvenience.

Thanks for shopping...

[ixion]

6. If you're in the top 5%, you're now flush with cash. Presto! Recovery! Otherwise

you're screwed.

[wackywaggin]

12. Sooo True!!

[divvy]

7. We are far better off today than we were a year ago.

Economic recovery has indeed begun. It is just taking some time to move out of the massive economic crater created by the republi-thugs over the past decade.

[DavidDvorkin]

8. There's a segment of DU that refuses to hear that

Any good news is dismissed with scorn and anger.

[Jakes Progress]

14. Come on.

Just because you have a good job and don't have to worry about losing your house doesn't mean that everyone is that lucky.

For the people that i work with (volunteer work) the change is not apparent. When you are losing your home tomorrow or when your car just died, any wall street hype that good times will reach real people sometime in the next decade is just so much hooey. Score and anger don't even begin to describe how these people, who are suffering right now, feel when rich people tell them how good it's getting.

[DavidDvorkin]

19. I don't have a job, good or otherwise

I've been unemployed since last May. I've been having a hard time. I'm also seeing more job openings to apply to, and I'm increasingly encouraged.

I'm very lucky in that my house is paid off. That's one advantage to being older and having lived in the same house for many decades. On the other hand, that also means I'm an older worker and am probably facing a lot of age bias right now. I'm encouraged nonetheless.

[Jakes Progress]

28. No money coming in for 9 months and you are still paying bills.

Makes you better off than those I counsel. Congratulations on your good fortune. Let us hear when you land one of those high paying jobs that are just laying around.

[TankLV]

15. Ain't that the truth!

While it's not "perfect" and a "done deal" for EVERYONE - things are most definitely better than they have been - and they have consistently gotten BETTER SINCE OBAMA TOOK OFFICE AND STARTED INSTITUTING HIS POLICY CHANGES!!!

but that's just too hard for many on this board to admit...and that's a shame...if I didn't know better I'd think they were closet repukes - they use the repukes' words - word for word!!!

[Crazy Dave]

23. You guys are slow today what's up?

Usually you get the "Duh...you're just a republican" reply much sooner than that. It's a favorite of those who cannot bring a better argument or proof to the table.

[Tansy_Gold]

16. No, not scorn and anger.

I'm not angry that 162,000 jobs were created last month. And I'm not greeting the report with scorn.

What I am doing is keeping a healthy sense of perspective.

One month of job gains, and in relatively insignificant numbers, does not mean the recession is over. It doesn't mean happy days are here again or that all our troubles are over.

It means nothing more or less than the BLS or some other government agency is reporting that 162,000 jobs were created.

It doesn't mean those were permanent, living-wage jobs with good benefits.

It doesn't mean all those who were hired can put their financial worries behind them.

It doesn't mean there will be a massive trickle-down of prosperity.

It MAY mean all those things. Or it may mean something very different.

It may mean higher-wage workers were laid off months ago and are now being replaced with lower-wage workers for the same jobs.

It may mean that temporary agencies are putting more people to work in short-term positions as companies rebuild inventories to see how the future unfolds.

It may mean a lot of things.

I can't speak for every doom and gloomer here on DU, but I can speak for myself. I'd love to be proven wrong about this so-called recovery. I'll lend you my "ITYS" rubber stamp if it happens. But so far I haven't seen any change in the fundamentals that led to the recent problems; if anything, I've seen those fundamentals reinforced. The FIRE corporations are still wildly out of financial control, there's no regulation, and the working classes are still being squeezed. That is not the recipe for a long-term sustainable recovery.

Believe the hype if you want. I can't stop you. And unlike some on DU I won't call you names.

But by the same token, it would be really nice if you'd show those of us who aren't jumping up and down about this jobs number just a tiny bit of respect, too. It's the Democratic thing to do.



Tansy Gold

[Crazy Dave]

24. You need to change that "we" to "some"

If you don't want to sound like an idiot.

[Greyhound]

26. The only "we" that are better off today than a year ago are the banksters and their masters.

More people are out of work today.

More people are homeless today.

More people are dying from poverty today.

More people have lost their homes today.

More people have lost their businesses today.

More monopolistic cabals control more industry today.

How long a list would you like?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Not to worry. Wall Street says it's on it's way. So, just go out and buy a lot of stuff.

Which may present a problem if you're broke or need a loan.

A "recovery" of a consumer economy without consumers is not a likely scenario.

[Crazy Dave]

13. That's why the new hire tax credit was such BS

Businesses aren't going to hire somebody because they can get a $5k tax credit, they're only going to hire people when they have enough work and/or business to hire.

[rusty fender]

10. If Obama said it,

then it has to be true.:sarcasm:

[branders seine]

17. We'll know there's a 'recovery' when we see it on our streets,

in our neighborhoods, at the retail centers, and among our friends and families.

There is no recovery. Indeed, one wonders, as one recent post said, what is left to recover.

Not until massive amounts of the nation's wealth starts redistributing down, will there be anything remotely like a real recovery.

We need to change the paradigm of our economy and overcome two generations of institutionalized theft. So far, Obama has continued the trajectory of the economy in exactly the same old WRONG direction. There has been no substantive change at all.

Government statistics are far worse than useless in signaling change.

[lib2DaBone]

18. You know.. the recovery that has the Big Insurance CEOs all getting raises...

The banks are doing great.. they are sitting on all that money we gave them for free and they are not going to lend it to anyone...

Government is doing good.. more jobs created in Federal Govt than any industry..

[Crazy Dave]

22. They don't sit on all the money...

They use a lot of it for wild parties and over the top bonuses.

[amborin]

20. EPI talks about the very bleak unemployment numbers:

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/jobs_picture_20100402/

This morning’s 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 sector added 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%.

It is important to note that for the next few months, Census hiring will likely be buffeting around month-to-month employment changes, as the number of temporary Census jobs showing up in payrolls may peak at over 600,000 in May, and then decline to near zero by the fall.

While the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7% in March, the long-term unemployment situation deteriorated. In March, an additional 414,000 unemployed workers crossed the six-months-unemployed threshold, so that now there 6.5 million workers who have been unemployed for longer than six months. The average unemployment spell was 31.2 weeks, the median unemployment spell was 20 weeks, and 44.1% of all unemployed workers had been unemployed for over six months.

The “underemployment rate” (which includes not just the officially unemployed, but also jobless workers who have given up looking for work and part-time workers who want full-time jobs) also rose, from 16.8% to 16.9%, as the number of involuntary part-timers increased by 263,000 workers. However, the number of “marginally attached” workers — jobless workers who have given up looking for work, declined by 209,000, likely because many marginally attached workers entered or re-entered the labor force, which increased by 398,000 in March. In March, there were 2.3 million marginally attached workers, 9.1 million involuntary part-timers, and 15.0 million unemployed workers in the United States, for a total of 26.4 million workers who are either unemployed or underemployed.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the labor market has shed 8.2 million payroll jobs. This number, however, understates the size of the gap in the labor market by failing to take into account the fact that simply to keep up with population growth, the labor market should have added around 2.8 million jobs since December 2007. This means the labor market is now roughly 11 million jobs below what would restore the pre-recession unemployment rate (which was 5.0% in December 2007). To get us back to the lower unemployment rate that existed prior to the 2001 recession (4.3% in March 2001), the U.S. economy is now nearly 17 million jobs short.

Furthermore, thesecalculations understate slack in the labor market by failing to take into account the decline in hours worked for those who have kept their jobs. At the start of the recession in December 2007, the length of the average workweek in the private sector was 34.7 hours. In March, it was 34.0 hours. This may at first seem like a small amount, but when multiplied across the labor market, the effect is nontrivial—the decline in the total number of hours worked in the private sector since the start of the recession that is due to reduced hours alone (i.e., not job loss) is equivalent to 2.2 million jobs.

[conscious evolution]

27. How many of those new jobs were at the Census Bureau?

And how many of those Census jobs are permanent and full time?
How many of the rest of those jobs are permenat and full time? With benefits?