Part-Time Jobs Surge To All Time High

As a reminder: jobs have quantity and quality components. The quantity component was good enough to convince the 10 Year the taper is imminent (if not stocks, which continue to trade dislocated from any and all fundamentals).

But how about the quality? In a word: not good. In June, the household survey reported that part-time jobs soared by 360,000 to 28,059,000 - an all time record high. Full time jobs? Down 240,000.

And looking back at the entire year, so far in 2013, just 130K Full-Time Jobs have been added, offset by a whopping 557K Part-Time jobs. And there is your jobs "quality" leading to today's market euphoria (if only for now). Read more >>

Scenes from Tokyo's Skid Row

You’ve probably never heard of Sanya. The Tokyo City Government doesn’t acknowledge its existence, and you won’t find it on any official maps. Sanya is more or less Tokyo’s skid row, where people, mostly men, end up when the other parts of this immense, gleaming city have stopped offering comfort and opportunity.

Sanya is where  the Japanese outcasts, food animal butchers, leather tanners, and other professions considered “unclean” by Japan’s traditionally Buddhist ruling class, aka the burakumin, or dowa, plied their trades for centuries. These tradesmen may mostly be gone, and the smell of the blood they spilled long-since drifted away, but the stigma of what Sanya once was remains, and it clings to the many of the people who live and work here. Read more >>

The Magic Money Printer: The Solution To All Of Life's Problems

The Fed has one, the ECB has one, the BOE, BOJ, SNB also have one. Even Zimbabwe has one. And anyone close to them is filthy rich and has nothing to worry about, ever again.

So it is only fair the "Magic Money Printing Machines" which are now the bedrock of the "developed" world's economies, should be made available to everyone. And at a price of just $4.79, soon everyone can be a self-made (literally) trillionaire, and live in filthy Keynesian opulence until the end of time. Read more >>

Americans buying fewer new cars over a lifetime

Chalk another one up for the recession and how it has altered life in America. New analysis by the automotive research firm Polk shows Americans can now expect to buy fewer new cars during their lifetime. On average, we’ll buy almost four fewer new cars by the time each of us hits 76 years old, the age when Polk believes most people are done buying new vehicles.

“The days when you bought a vehicle for 4 or 5 years are likely over,” said Anthony Pratt, Polk director of forecasting.

We’ve talked for some time about Americans holding on to their new cars longer and the reasons have been well-documented. Cars last longer, and as their prices have gone up, people are less inclined to take on a monthly payment. Since the recession they have stretched out the length of time to pay off a new loan. In other words, people now expect to be in their car six, seven or eight years after they buy it. Read more >>

80% Of The World Is Now In Contraction

With the US closed today, the rest of the world is enjoying a moderate rise in risk for the same old irrational reason we have all grown to loathe in the New Normal: expectations of more easing, or "bad news if great news", this time from China, which over the weekend reported the first official sub-50 PMI print declining from the magical 50.1 to 49.2, as now even the official RAND() Chinese data has joined the HSBC PMI indicator in the contraction space for the first time since November. Sadly, following today's manufacturing PMI update, we find that the rest of the world is not doing any better, and in fact of the 22 countries we track, 80% are now in contraction territory. Read more >>

China Confronts Mounting Piles of Unsold Goods

After three decades of torrid growth, China is encountering an unfamiliar problem with its newly struggling economy: a huge buildup of unsold goods that is cluttering shop floors, clogging car dealerships and filling factory warehouses.

The glut of everything from steel and household appliances to cars and apartments is hampering China’s efforts to emerge from a sharp economic slowdown. It has also produced a series of price wars and has led manufacturers to redouble efforts to export what they cannot sell at home.

The severity of China’s inventory overhang has been carefully masked by the blocking or adjusting of economic data by the Chinese government — all part of an effort to prop up confidence in the economy among business managers and investors. Read more >>

New and Used Car Sales Tumble

Besides GM stuffing its dealers with excess inventory at record levels to create the illusion of car sales, allowing the company to book revenue, not only has there now been a collapse in show room traffic, but car dealers can't close sales.

Based on sales data from roughly midway through May, CNW Marketing forecasts overall U.S. new car sales will be up only about 6 percent from May 2011 -- well below the double-digit pace of 2012 overall, year-to-date.

The used car market, where demand is usually higher than for new cars, is also weakening. And CNW claims there is a sharp decline in new car sales to young buyers. "In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they accounted for about 5 percent of the U.S. market. That’s now down to barely 2 percent among 16- to 21-year-olds."

US is Becoming a Nation of Part-Time Workers

As today's NFP report once again showed, the average hourly earnings barely budged at $23.38 from $23.37 last month, and in fact declined on an inflation-adjusted basis. Why? Because as we [Zero Hedge] predicted both in February (and in 2010) the US is increasingly becoming a population of part-time workers, as full time jobs disappear for good, and are offshored abroad at best.

April confirmed everything we had been warning about: in the month, full time jobs dropped to 114,478 from 115,290, an epic drop of 812,000 in full time jobs which was the biggest since... March 2009! The offset? Why a surge in part-time jobs of course, which increased by 508,000 in the month of April.

So while seasonally adjusted, birth/death recasted jobs may have increased by 115,000, the real quality jobs, imploded, which unfortunately is merely a part of a longer-term secular trend as part of the new part-time normal. More...

4.5 job hunters for every job opening in May

The number of available jobs in the U.S. as of June 30 was about 3.1 million, a slight increase from May when there were 3 million, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's monthly openings and Labor Turnover Survey released today.

Compared to June 2010, job openings rose 16 percent. To put this in more perspective, these numbers were much better than the 2.1 million job openings in July 2009, the lowest total number of available jobs since the government began recording the data 10 years ago. But things are pretty lousy compared to December 2007 before the recession began when there were 4.4 million available jobs.

With about 14.09 million people unemployed in June, there were nearly 4.5 potential job seekers for each opening, down from about 4.6 in May. Of the total jobs in June, only 2.3 percent were considered by employers to be vacant and likely to be filled within 30 days, which is why it's so hard to for unemployed people to find work. More...

There's no economic turnaround, just the opposite

In his latest report, John Williams estimates the government is routinely overstating job growth by “230,000 jobs” a month. Using simple math, 192,000 created jobs (according to BLS) subtracted from 230,000 overstated jobs gives you an actual net loss of 38,000 jobs. I called Williams to check my analysis, and he told me it is not that simple because the government’s estimations are “the worst in modern economic history.” Williams says unemployment numbers are “openly misleading” and virtually “worthless.” More...

Banks slashed small business lending by $43 billion

The numbers back up what small business owners have been saying for two years: Main Street suffered a brutal credit crunch.

The total value of outstanding loans to small businesses plunged by $43 billion, or 6.2%, between June 2009 and June 2010, according to a report released this week by the Small Business Administration. That's a drop of $59 billion, or 8.3%, from June 2008.

The drop-off in small business loans came against an overall backdrop of reduced lending. Lending to large businesses -- measured by commercial loans of more than $1 million -- dropped by $156.2 billion, or 8.9%, between 2009 and 2010. Read more...

9 Years Worth of foreclosed homes in bank inventory

Image by respres via Flickr

financialarmageddon.com

Economic theory has it that prices tend to rise when demand exceeds supply. But when the potential inventory of homes for sale by banks -- which is aside from the properties that homeowners and builders might also be looking to unload -- is equivalent to nine years' worth of demand, as detailed by Real Time Economics in "Number of the Week: 103 Months to Clear Housing Inventory," that suggests those who see signs of a recovery in the residential real estate market should probably be thinking about checking into rehab:

103: The number of months it would take to sell off all the foreclosed homes in banks’ possession, plus all the homes likely to end up there over the next couple years, at the current rate of sales.

How much should we worry about a new leg down in the housing market? If the number of foreclosed homes piling up at banks is any indication, there’s ample reason for concern.

As of March, banks had an inventory of about 1.1 million foreclosed homes, up 20% from a year earlier, according to estimates from LPS Applied Analytics. Another 4.8 million mortgage holders were at least 60 days behind on their payments or in the foreclosure process, meaning their homes were well on their way to the inventory pile. That “shadow inventory” was up 30% from a year earlier.

Based on the rate at which banks have been selling those foreclosed homes over the past few months, all that inventory, real and shadow, would take 103 months to unload. That’s nearly nine years. Of course, banks could pick up the pace of sales, but the added supply of distressed homes would weigh heavily on prices — and thus boost their losses.

Click here to read the rest.

Nearly One in Five EU Residents Struggle to Cope Financially

John Chapman and Femke De Keulenaer

BRUSSELS -- In July 2009, at a time when several European economies were just coming out of recession, nearly one in five (18%) European Union residents said their household had at some time in the past year run out of money to pay ordinary bills or to buy food or other daily consumer items.

Romanians (45%) and Latvians (40%) were most likely to say they had run out of money to pay for essential goods and services in the 12 months before the survey. In a number of other eastern European countries, such as Hungary, Bulgaria, and Lithuania, about a third of respondents said their household had gone through a similar experience. However, far fewer residents reported such problems in Denmark (5%), the Netherlands (8%), Sweden and Luxembourg (both 9%), and Germany (10%).

Looking ahead to the next 12 months, slightly more than one-quarter (26%) of EU residents expected their household's financial situation to deteriorate. More than half (55%) of respondents expected that their household's financial situation would be stable and 16% anticipated that their household's financial situation would improve.

Residents in Latvia (65%) and Lithuania (58%) were the most likely to expect their household's financial situation to be worse in the 12 months following the poll. At least 4 in 10 residents expected the same in Hungary (48%), Ireland (43%), Estonia, Greece, and Romania (all 41%).

Among the least likely to be pessimistic about their household's future financial situation (that is, thinking it would deteriorate) were those in Denmark (10%), Finland and Sweden (both 15%), Luxembourg (17%), and Austria (18%). Furthermore, at the time of the survey, at least one in five respondents in Sweden (24%) and Denmark (21%) expected an improvement in their household's financial situation in the year to come.

The EU residents most likely to expect their household's financial problems to get worse in the next 12 months were the unemployed (33%), retirees (31%), and those aged 55 and older (31%). Furthermore, 42% of those residents who had been unable to pay essential bills thought their household situation would get worse, compared with 23% of those who never had that experience.

These results show the picture of how EU residents were coping with the effects of the financial crisis in July 2009. Early next year, we will publish another article on this same topic.

Eurobarometer Reports

Gallup conducts Flash Eurobarometer surveys for the European Commission. These surveys enable European policymakers to hear the voices of EU residents in the 27 member states. Gallup has worked with the Commission on more than 90 Flash Eurobarometer surveys (with close to 1.5 million interviews) on subjects from the euro to consumer protection and from higher education to the financial crisis.

Read the full report online.

Sign up for Gallup e-mail alerts or RSS feeds

Get Gallup news on Facebook and Twitter

TrimTabs estimated that US economy shed 255,000 jobs in November

Image via Wikipedia

zerohedge.com
TrimTabs employment analysis, which uses real-time daily income tax deposits from all U.S. taxpayers to compute employment growth, estimated that the U.S. economy shed 255,000 jobs in November. This past month’s results were an improvement of only 10.2% from the 284,000 jobs lost in October.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the U.S. economy lost an astonishingly better than expected 11,000 jobs in November. In addition, the BLS revised their September and October results down a whopping 203,000 jobs, resulting in a 45% improvement over their preliminary results.

Something is not right in Kansas! Either the BLS results are wrong, our results are in error, or the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

We believe the BLS is grossly underestimating current job losses due to their flawed survey methodology. Those flaws include rigid seasonal adjustments, a mysterious birth/death adjustment, and the fact that only 40% to 60% of the BLS survey is complete by the time of the first release and subject to revision.

Seasonal adjustments are particularly problematic around the holiday season due to the large number of temporary holiday-related jobs added to payrolls in October and November which then disappear in January. In the past two months, the BLS seasonal adjustments subtracted 2.4 million jobs from the results. In January, when the seasonal adjustments are the largest of the year, the BLS will add anywhere from 2.0 to 2.3 million jobs. In our opinion, trying to glean monthly job losses numbering in the tens of thousands or even in the hundreds of thousands are lost in the enormous size of the seasonal adjustments.

In November, the BLS revised their September and October job losses down a surprising 44.5%, or 203,000 jobs. In the twelve months ending in October, the BLS revised their job loss estimates up or down by a staggering 679,000 jobs, or 13.0%. Until this past month, these revisions brought the BLS’ revised estimates to within a couple percent of TrimTabs’ original estimates.

The large divergence between the two results begs the question of what is causing the difference. While we don’t have an answer today, we will be poring over the data in an attempt to answer that question.

Unemployment Insurance Breaking Down

Unemployment offices are receiving record numbers of applications and phone calls. One story the media isn't covering is the sheer horror many out of work Americans feel when they try and contact and apply for unemployment insurance benefits. Sometimes months may pass by before some families begin to receive benefits. Many are confused with the inability to get through to offices by phone, and the closing down of physical locations by the state. What are the number that give up on unemployment and simply apply for welfare and food stamps?