San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

I've noticed the same thing... The revised number from the previous week almost always is revised to a larger number.

I look around at my employer, my friends' employers... there's not a lot of hiring going on and a lot of layoffs going on. Some of the bigger companies are doing it in trickle form, to avoid reporting it as a layoff... but a steady trickle still adds up.

Yup, the are playing the confidence game they best they can with consistently bad numbers. The underlying fundamentals and what is driving unemployment have not changed since the downturn started. Eventually, the market will have to look down again and we will get another round of panic.

This guy does a really good job of dissecting the job numbers. This is from earlier this month for May.

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/may-e...

As before, my assumption is that these numbers are quite fuzzy, not worth the paper they are printed on, and heavily falsified to achieve narrow political and market influencing aims.

While I can certainly understand, and even find some compassion for, the desire to manipulate the data to inject some confidence and optimism into the populace and markets, I must regretfully conclude that such efforts are more damaging than helpful.

We did ourselves no favors by fibbing to ourselves during the blowing of the credit bubble, and we do ourselves no favors by repeating that behavior now. We need good and believable data. I judge that our markets would respond better in the long run to believable data, and that we actually owe it to ourselves to provide the most honest and accurate assessments of reality that we can.

Report rosey (fake) unemployment numbers, stock market rallies.

Wait for some other form of rosey (fake) news (perhaps housing starts) and report it along with actual (less fake) downward revised employment numbers; stock market goes up.

Wash-rinse-repeat enough times and the sheeple start to feel like its safe to put the 201k portion they have left of their old 401k back into the market.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30750253/ns/...

Can you guess what happens next?

and don't forget that we need 150K new jobs per month for college grads, etc

a little fact that the analysts and reporters conveniently forget when they are spinning the numbers

Seems to me the spin sort of works physiologically for some employers. I know of a few companies that have been holding off hiring in the bay area, waiting to see if the economy gets worse. Funny thing is just today those few companies suddenly opened these positions this afternoon, and their respective head hunters have been data mining some of the people on my LinkedIn contacts today. We just hired a few college grads today too. Much easier these days, since we don't get to much competition with the "I want to work at a company that pays me to write crappy facebook apps" companies.

Unemployment Lies

I've been out of work since March this year and the IT market is DISMAL especially here in San Diego. NO JOBS!

With all due respect mixxalot, I don't think I have received an email from you yet :)

As if on que for this thread we get:

Yahoo Finance is reporting Jobless benefit rolls post first dip since January.

The number of people receiving unemployment aid fell by 148,000 to 6.69 million in the week that ended June 6 -- the largest drop in more than seven years. The decline broke a string of 21 straight increases in the number of people claiming benefits for more than a week, the last 19 of which were records. (A dip in continuing claims several weeks ago was later revised higher.)

On the surface, the government seemed to signal Thursday that more Americans are finding jobs: The number of people receiving unemployment aid fell for the first time since early January.

But that doesn't necessarily mean more companies are hiring.

Fewer people are receiving jobless aid largely because more of them have exhausted their standard unemployment benefits, which typically last 26 weeks. Government figures, in fact, show the proportion of recipients who used up their jobless benefits in May topped 49 percent, a monthly record.

If you look closely at the BLS reports, you can find the U-6 number for unemployment. The number that's reported in the MSM is almost always the U-3 number. The lie. But the U-6, the truth, is usually about twice that of the U-3. So whatever they end up "adjusting" the U-3 to, just double it to approximate the real unemployment rate.

Regional numbers just came out today.
CA had a whoppin' 11.5% unemployment again.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0...

San Diego tends to be lower than the state by about a percent.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure. - Samuel Clemens (alias Mark Twain)

UPDATE

Insiders Dump Shares at Fastest Pace in 2 Years.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.c...

Can you guess what happens next?

More evidence that BLS birth-death data for May was mostly just BS.

-"The Labor Department said the number of mass layoff actions - defined as job cuts involving at least 50 people from a single employer - increased to 2,933 in May from 2,712 in April, resulting in the loss of 312,880 jobs.

It was the largest loss of jobs connected to mass layoffs on records dating to 1995."

http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/23/news/eco...

I just find it hard to believe that job cuts are slowing when large layoffs are increasing. I suppose you could argue that small buisness are pickup up the slack, creating jobs while bigger buisness are cutting, but I kinda doubt it. Not in the biggest downturn since the depression, and when credit, the life blood of most small buisness, is disapearing.