Women Waiting Tables Provide Most of Female Gains in Employment

Unemployment data appear to reflect big advances for women. The jobless rate in August for females 20 years and older was 6.3 percent, the lowest since December 2008, compared with 7.1 percent for men. As recently as January, the rate was 7.3 percent for both genders, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The downside is that the gains have been largely in lower-paying industries such as waitresses, in-home health care, food preparation and housekeeping. About 60 percent of the increase in employment for women from 2009 to 2012 was in jobs that pay less than $10.10 an hour, compared with 20 percent for men, according to a study by the National Women’s Law Center using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The numbers expose a soft spot in an economic recovery that has reduced the overall unemployment rate to 7.3 percent from 10 percent in October 2009. Quality of jobs is an increasing concern for U.S. policy makers and economists since it affects the level of incomes and wage disparities. Read more >>

Consumer Confidence Collapses - Biggest Miss On Record

This is the first consecutive monthly drop in 14 months and the largest miss vs expectations on record. Printing at 76.8 (against an expectation of 82.0), ths is the lowest in 5 months and points to the picture we have been painting of a consumer increasingly affected by rising rates and saoring gas prices amid stagnant incomes.

As Citi notes below, this is the exact same pattern we have seen play out in the last 2 cycles and suggest significant downside risk to US equities. The economic outlook sub-index collapsed to its lowest since January. Read more >>

Walmart is even worse than you think

Almost 30 years ago, as the U.S. was bleeding jobs, Walmart launched a "Buy America" program and started hanging "Made in America" signs in its 750 stores.  It was a marketing success, cementing the retailer's popularity in the country's struggling, blue-collar heartland.  A few years later, NBC's Dateline revealed the program to be a sham.  Sure, Walmart was willing to buy U.S.-made goods — so long as they were as cheap as imports, which, of course, they weren't.  Dateline found that Walmart's sourcing was in fact rapidly shifting to Asia.

This year, Walmart is back with a new "Buy America" program.  In January, the company announced that it would purchase an additional $50 billion worth of domestic goods over the next decade.  This week, Walmart is convening several hundred suppliers, along with a handful of governors, for a summit on U.S. manufacturing .

This sounds pretty substantial, but in fact it's just a more sophisticated and media savvy version of Walmart's hollow 1980s Buy America campaign.  For starters, $50 billion over a decade may sound huge at first, but measured against Walmart's galactic size, it's not.  An additional $5 billion a year amounts to only 1.5 percent of what Walmart currently spends on inventory. Read more >>

Unemployment in Euro Zone Reaches a Record High

Unemployment in the euro zone rose to yet another record high in the first two months of the year, official data showed Tuesday, providing confirmation that the economy remains in a deep freeze.

The jobless rate reached 12 percent in both January and February, the highest since the creation of the euro in 1999, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg. The January jobless rate for the 17-nation currency union was revised upward from the previously reported 11.9 percent.

For the overall European Union, the February jobless rate rose to 10.9 percent from 10.8 percent in January, Eurostat said, with more than 26 million people without work across the 27-nation bloc.

European officials continue to hold out hope that the economy, which continued to shrink in the first quarter of 2013, will begin turning around in the second half of the year. Many private sector forecasters are more pessimistic, expecting a contraction of as much as 2 percent in the euro zone’s gross domestic product this year, after a 0.9 percent contraction last year. Read more >>

New York's Homelessness Worst Since The Great Depression

State and local governments nationwide have struggled to accommodate a homeless population that has changed in recent years - now including large numbers of families with young children. As the WSJ reports, more than 21,000 children - an unprecedented 1% of the city's youth - slept each night in a city shelter in January, an increase of 22% in the past year; as homeless families now spend more than a year in a shelter, on average, for the first time since 1987.

New York City has seen one of the steepest increases in homeless families in the past decade, advocates said, growing 73% since 2002, and "is facing a homeless crisis worse than any time since the Great Depression."

Homeless advocates said the Obama administration has focused on more visible problems, such as those sleeping on the streets, taking resources away from families. The steep rise has reignited questions about whether New York's economic turnaround of the past two decades has helped the city's poorest residents as they note (despite today's Dow record highs), "the economy is nowhere near where it was." Read more >>

Army Suicides This Year Exceed 2012 Combat Deaths in Afghanistan

The number of suicides among U.S. Army active duty and reserve personnel in 2012 is higher than the total combined military fatalities from Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan over the same timeframe.

Even without Army data for October, the number of deaths believed to be suicides among U.S. Army personnel from January through September still surpass the combined military combat deaths in Afghanistan from January up to October 22.

In 2012, there have been a total of 247 suspected suicides among Army active and reserve duty personnel. Of those, 158 have been confirmed as suicides and 89 remain under investigation. Read more >>

Consumer Comfort Plummets Most Since Feb 2008

Having staggered along the bottom, mired in misery and reality, for over 3 years, the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index finally signaled depression-fatigue in January of this year and started to break out - albeit to historically still low levels.

This was then heralded in self-fulfilling style as an indication that everything was good again in the world, money would come off the sidelines, consumers would buy more iPads and American cars, and all would be well in the world.

Well the sad reality is that the last 3 weeks - as stocks have begun to lag, economic data has begun to reflect an un-warmed winter reality, and Europe's conflagration reignites - have seen the largest collapse in consumer comfort in over 3 years and has fallen to 3-month lows. Digging into the detail is even more worrisome as in the last 3 weeks the comfort with personal finances has fallen by the most ever and back to six-month lows. More...

Real Unemployment Rises 0.3% To 16.8%, Non-Seasonally Adjusted Number Near All Time Highs

Source: ZH
With economic optimism back over the U-3 data, which was "surprisingly" not impacted by mid-winter snow (but as Art Cashin says, a horrible number would have been seen as a buying catalyst due to the "non-recurring" nature of snow in February), many seem to have missed that real unemployment, or the BLS' U-6 series actually climbed by 0.3%, to 16.8% from 16.5% in January. Additionally, the Non-Seasonally Adjusted U-6 number was barely changed, and was flat at 17.9%, just a hair away from January's record 18%. More...