Washington Post: Jobless rate drops to 8.9 percent, lowest since 2009; employers add 192K jobs

[Westbrook36]

Mr. Market wasn't too impressed with these numbers today.

[Thiebear]

What are the real numbers in that chart at the end? are they correct?

And the participation rate is what i was talking about. If you have 3 years of unemployment they are still participating in collecting income, its just not ending in 13weeks anymore and therefore should be counted differently now?

[Madison Redskin]

Mr. Market wasn't too impressed with these numbers today.

A lot of people who got new jobs are pleased. The situation might still be ****ty, but good news is good news .... unless you're a republican and rooting for the economy to totally tank.

[greenspandan]

Yes, thats exactly what I said....

You'll see liberals poo-pooing unemployment numbers by using the same argument WB36 was using.

can you cite an example?

[SkinsHokieFan]

can you cite an example?

http://www.extremeskins.com/showthread.php?37304-Jobless-Claims-Lowest-in-Eight-Months

[Thiebear]

http://www.extremeskins.com/showthread.php?37304-Jobless-Claims-Lowest-in-Eight-Months

It depends on what you know: the 5yrs before that made 6.1% seem high.

Now 6.1%? They are talking about changing the way we see this number as it might not drop that low again.

[TimmySmith]

What are the real numbers in that chart at the end? are they correct?

And the participation rate is what i was talking about. If you have 3 years of unemployment they are still participating in collecting income, its just not ending in 13weeks anymore and therefore should be counted differently now?

My personal opinion is that the 2% drop in participation rate and 2% drop in unemployment rate at precisely the same time is a mere coincidence and should be discounted without further discussion.

[Henry]

What do you get from this?

That since January 2011, the red line is dropping a lot faster than the blue line, and the black line is rising?

Again, no one is saying this is more than a good sign. No one is considering this the end-all of recovery. Just move in the right direction. Is that so hard to acknowledge?

[December90]

it's sad that some people like westbrook36 and december90 are so commited to their anti-obama rhetoric that they simply refuse to believe simple facts. reality has no effect on their opinions.

We are trending in the right direction. But when the rate drops because an unemployed person no longer counts instead of because they found a job, that is to me "Government Math"

I find it quite interesting that you can that an entire post that says

"Two simple words for you "Government Math""

and twist that into anti-obama rhetoric.

now for the real "anti-Obama rhetoric:

Wake me up when unemployment gets down to the rate that Bush had during his administration... (As if it is the presidency that creates jobs. Perhaps it would be a nice time to compare unemployment with the Republicans or Democrats in charge of the House and Senate...) Since Republicans won election to control the House, things have improved (far from unexpected and I did predict it in multiple other threads) .

Look back to when Democrats took control in 2006 and see if you can make the same comment about them:) What was unemployment that day that Pelosi was elected as Speaker of the House? What was it her last day as Speaker?

[Madison Redskin]

Wake me up when unemployment gets down to the rate that Bush had during his administration... (As if it is the presidency that creates jobs. Perhaps it would be a nice time to compare unemployment with the Republicans or Democrats in charge of the House and Senate...) Since Republicans won election to control the House, things have improved (far from unexpected and I did predict it in multiple other threads) .

Look back to when Democrats took control in 2006 and see if you can make the same comment about them:) What was unemployment that day that Pelosi was elected as Speaker of the House? What was it her last day as Speaker?

Causation and correlation aren't the same thing. I got piss drunk at a racetrack a few years ago and won a lot of money. I do not win a lot of money every time I get piss drunk.

[Predicto]

We are trending in the right direction. But when the rate drops because an unemployed person no longer counts instead of because they found a job, that is to me "Government Math"

I find it quite interesting that you can that an entire post that says

"Two simple words for you "Government Math""

and twist that into anti-obama rhetoric.

now for the real "anti-Obama rhetoric:

Wake me up when unemployment gets down to the rate that Bush had during his administration... (As if it is the presidency that creates jobs. Perhaps it would be a nice time to compare unemployment with the Republicans or Democrats in charge of the House and Senate...) Since Republicans won election to control the House, things have improved (far from unexpected and I did predict it in multiple other threads) .

Look back to when Democrats took control in 2006 and see if you can make the same comment about them:) What was unemployment that day that Pelosi was elected as Speaker of the House? What was it her last day as Speaker?

You are really claiming, with a straight face, that the horrible banking crisis and subsequent recession were caused by Nancy Pelosi's ascension to Speaker of the House?

[December90]

Causation and correlation aren't the same thing. I got piss drunk at a racetrack a few years ago and won a lot of money. I do not win a lot of money every time I get piss drunk.

You did see the part that said "As if it is the presidency that creates jobs" didn't you?

Please remember to provide your same reply to those who choose to blame Bush for where we are now.

I whole-heartedly believe that politicians can do very little to create jobs. I do believe that they have great power when it comes to discouraging job growth and getting in the way of job creation. The best thing that our President and our Congress can do is to get out of the way of the private sector and stop punishing success. (Not a call for zero regulation, but a call for a swing in the balance of regulation to the point that it does not harm job creation. The Left Wing Environmental movement is a good idea at heart but terrible in practice. We cannot manufacture anything within the United States anymore because of the environmental policies that are way out of balance. We cannot build more Power plants because coal burning in polluting and Nuclear is too dangerous. (way oversimplification of a complicated issue, but I think the point is still valid)

---------- Post added March-4th-2011 at 12:23 PM ----------

You are really claiming, with a straight face, that the horrible banking crisis and subsequent recession were caused by Nancy Pelosi's ascension to Speaker of the House?

If that is the oversimplification you are looking for. Sure.

That line is just as valid as the left's claims that it is Bush's fault.

[Predicto]

You did see the part that said "As if it is the presidency that creates jobs" didn't you?

Please remember to provide your same reply to those who choose to blame Bush for where we are now.

I whole-heartedly believe that politicians can do very little to create jobs. I do believe that they have great power when it comes to discouraging job growth and getting in the way of job creation. The best thing that our President and our Congress can do is to get out of the way of the private sector and stop punishing success. (Not a call for zero regulation, but a call for a swing in the balance of regulation to the point that it does not harm job creation. The Left Wing Environmental movement is a good idea at heart but terrible in practice. We cannot manufacture anything within the United States anymore because of the environmental policies that are way out of balance. We cannot build more Power plants because coal burning in polluting and Nuclear is too dangerous. (way oversimplification of a complicated issue, but I think the point is still valid)

---------- Post added March-4th-2011 at 12:23 PM ----------

If that is the oversimplification you are looking for. Sure.

That line is just as valid as the left's claims that it is Bush's fault.

I see enough oversimplification in the first half of this post to serve me for a while, thanks.

A huge part of the banking crisis and recession was due to government "getting out of the way." Ask my wife, who is a federal bank regulator, what happened when Bush's FDIC chairman Don Powell, directly ordered the FDIC bank examiners to stop investigating the safety and soundness of bank lending practices because it was "getting in the way" of bank freedom. She could explain it to you for hours on end (and no, it wasn't Barney Frank's fault )

[twa]

That since January 2011, the red line is dropping a lot faster than the blue line, and the black line is rising?

Again, no one is saying this is more than a good sign. No one is considering this the end-all of recovery. Just move in the right direction. Is that so hard to acknowledge?

Is it?.....that is not clear from the way I read it

....It could certainly be worse though

added

I find that last line running thru my head quite a bit unfortunately

[December90]

I see enough oversimplification in the first half of this post to serve me for a while, thanks.

A huge part of the banking crisis and recession was due to government "getting out of the way." Ask my wife, who is a federal bank regulator, what happened when Bush's FDIC chairman Don Powell, directly ordered the FDIC bank examiners to stop investigating the safety and soundness of bank lending practices because it was "getting in the way" of bank freedom. She could explain it to you for hours on end (and no, it wasn't Barney Frank's fault )

My wife worked as a loan officer with Navy Federal Credit Union. In her time there the Federal Government told them to loosen their lending guidelines because they were being too strict with requiring credit worthy borrowers. In this case "Regulation" was to require lending institutions to make riskier loans in order to address the social concern that minorities were not getting sufficient access to credit. Never mind that the credit worthiness of a borrower at NFCU is and was colorblind.

The social reason behind the financial policy is a strong contributing factor to the problem.

[Madison Redskin]

My wife worked as a loan officer with Navy Federal Credit Union. In her time there the Federal Government told them to loosen their lending guidelines because they were being too strict with requiring credit worthy borrowers. In this case "Regulation" was to require lending institutions to make riskier loans in order to address the social concern that minorities were not getting sufficient access to credit. Never mind that the credit worthiness of a borrower at NFCU is and was colorblind.

The social reason behind the financial policy is a strong contributing factor to the problem.

Do you know what was, perhaps, the biggest contributing factor? The insatiable demand for mortgage backed securities prior to the collapse of the housing market. That has nothing to do with social policies or anything that Republicans or Dems did.

[Predicto]

My wife worked as a loan officer with Navy Federal Credit Union. In her time there the Federal Government told them to loosen their lending guidelines because they were being too strict with requiring credit worthy borrowers. In this case "Regulation" was to require lending institutions to make riskier loans in order to address the social concern that minorities were not getting sufficient access to credit. Never mind that the credit worthiness of a borrower at NFCU is and was colorblind.

The social reason behind the financial policy is a strong contributing factor to the problem.

Well, my wife has been an enforcement attorney at the FDIC for 19 years, and that is not the story she tells me. (I'm not talking about NCFU in particular, of course). She went after banks who discriminated in their loan practices. They would loan to white people with certain income levels, but not to black people with the same income levels. She never went after banks because they were just cautious in general and remained colorblind. Of course, I guarantee that every bank she ever went after claimed that they were colorblind, and the Feds were being unfair to them and loosening their otherwise reasonable lending practices. :whoknows:

Fact: The subprime lending crisis was almost entirely due to securitization of loans and speculative lending to house flippers by private industry lenders. The idea that it was Fannie and Freddie and Barney Frank forcing loans to unqualified minorities is one of the Big Lies of our time.

The truth is, the closest thing we have to a genuine culprit in the housing bubble is Alan Greenspan. He refused to set national mortgage standards, kept interest rates artificially low, and inflated the heck out of the bubble.

[deejaydana]

Fact: The subprime lending crisis was almost entirely due to securitization of loans and speculative lending to house flippers by private industry lenders. The idea that it was Fannie and Freddie and Barney Frank forcing loans to unqualified minorities is one of the Big Lies of our time.

This is completely off base. When all those lenders, large and small, knew they had an ultimate place to throw those bogus loans to (which was to Fannie and Freddie) they were free at that point to write garbage. How is the gov't not complicit here?

[Predicto]

This is completely off base. When all those lenders, large and small, knew they had an ultimate place to throw those bogus loans to (which was to Fannie and Freddie) they were free at that point to write garbage. How is the gov't not complicit here?

Sorry, that is not where the bogus loans went. That is the Big Lie. Fannie and Freddie did not buy subprime mortgages - they weren't allowed to. The definitiion of a subprime mortgage is (basically) a mortgage that isn't good enough to sell to Fannie and Freddie.

Start with the most basic fact of all: virtually none of the $1.5 trillion of cratering subprime mortgages were backed by Fannie or Freddie. That’s right — most subprime mortgages did not meet Fannie or Freddie’s strict lending standards. All those no money down, no interest for a year, low teaser rate loans? All the loans made without checking a borrower’s income or employment history? All made in the private sector, without any support from Fannie and Freddie.

Look at the numbers. While the credit bubble was peaking from 2003 to 2006, the amount of loans originated by Fannie and Freddie dropped from $2.7 trillion to $1 trillion. Meanwhile, in the private sector, the amount of subprime loans originated jumped to $600 billion from $335 billion and Alt-A loans hit $400 billion from $85 billion in 2003. Fannie and Freddie, which wouldn’t accept crazy floating rate loans, which required income verification and minimum down payments, were left out of the insanity.

http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/fannie_mae_and.html

Subprimes were sold to the private market, where Goldman and other companies chopped them up into securities and sold them on the open market agfter taking huge cuts for themselves.

[Westbrook36]

I love threads like these. It has been well established that at least 5 factors played an integral role in the housing collapse yet you have people, powered by google, who attempt to place all the blame on one entity and ignore/downplay the others.

[Larry]

Fact: The subprime lending crisis was almost entirely due to securitization of loans and speculative lending to house flippers by private industry lenders. The idea that it was Fannie and Freddie and Barney Frank forcing loans to unqualified minorities is one of the Big Lies of our time.

This is completely off base. When all those lenders, large and small, knew they had an ultimate place to throw those bogus loans to (which was to Fannie and Freddie) they were free at that point to write garbage. How is the gov't not complicit here?

Sorry, that is not where the bogus loans went. That is the Big Lie. Fannie and Freddie did not buy subprime mortgages - they weren't allowed to. The definitiion of a subprime mortgage is (basically) a mortgage that isn't good enough to sell to Fannie and Freddie.

Subprimes were sold to the private market, where Goldman and other companies chopped them up into securities and sold them on the open market agfter taking huge cuts for themselves.

Don't know how this will affect y'all's debate, but I understand that here in Florida, at the height of the crisis, over 60% of the defaulted loans were on second (or more) houses.

(But mostly, I think that Predicto's right, that the big culprit was the securitization and packaging of bad loans. Because that's what turned "John Doe can't make his payments" into "OMG! The entire US economy is going to crash!" IMO, the problem wasn't that people defaulted, it was that the investors were so incredibly leveraged that the tiniest bump in the road caused disaster.) (But that's an uninformed opinion.)

[Predicto]

I love threads like these. It has been well established that at least 5 factors played an integral role in the housing collapse yet you have people, powered by google, who attempt to place all the blame on one entity and ignore/downplay the others.

Of course, some factors are bigger than others, and some factors are correlated with others.

[deejaydana]

Well it doesn't help that the gov't tries to distance itself from the Wamus and Countrywides of the world/recent past when it was people like Bush Jr and Barney Frank who pushed homeownership to such unrealistic levels. Now they don't want to take responsibility for the train wreck they helped cause. I don't give gov't a free pass here and I've read a wealth of information upon this topic. Any way you look it, we collectively just screwed the pooch here. I'm currently working to obtain a home loan, not my first, and I can't believe how completely gummed up and dysfunctional the lending industry is right now as it painfully tries to right itself from these past indiscretions.

[Westbrook36]

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41911006

Labor force participation dropped to a 30 year low. Explains this "good" unemployment number during this perilous period.

All the sunshine day posters should check out the following:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=270957

[The Brave Little Toaster Oven]

If anyone believes these numbers, the government has you exactly where they want you. Gallup has the real numbers at 10.2 percent. Let's not even get into underemployed and those who have given up looking for work and don't count against the unemployment number. Hey, why don't we look at the total workforce as compared to working age population?

Plus....wait until May when a new batch of seniors graduate from college....this number is only temporary