Another Fraudulent Jobs Report Paul Craig Roberts Infowars.com April 6, 2014
The March payroll jobs report released April 4 claims 192,000 new private sector jobs. Here is what John Williams has to say about the claim: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) deliberately publishes its seasonally-adjusted historical payrollemployment and household-survey (unemployment) data so that the numbers are neither consistent nor comparable with current headline reporting. The upside revisions to the January and February monthly jobs gains, and the relatively strong March payroll showing, reflected nothing more than concealed, favorable shifts in underlying seasonal factors, hidden by the lack of consistent BLS reporting. In like manner, consistent month-to-month changes in the unemployment rate or labor force simply are not knowable, because the BLS cloaks the consistent and comparable numbers.” Here is what Dave Kranzler has to say: “the employment report is probably the most deceptively fraudulent report produced by the Government.” As I have pointed out for a decade, the “New Economy” jobs that we were promised in exchange for our manufacturing jobs and tradable professional service jobs that were offshored have never shown up. The transnational corporations and their hired shills among economists lied to us. Not even a jobs report as deceptive and fraudulent as the BLS payroll jobs report can hide the fact that Congress, the White House, and the American people have sat sucking their thumbs while corporations maximized profits for the one percent at the expense of everyone else in the United States. Let’s look at where the alleged jobs are. The BLS jobs report says that 28,400 jobs were created in March in wholesale and retail sales. March is the month that Macy’s, Sears, JC Penny, Staples, Radio Shack, Office Depot, and other retailers announced combined closings of several thousand stores, but more retail clerks were hired. The BLS payroll jobs report claims 57,000 jobs in “professional and business services.” Are these jobs for lawyers, accountants, architects, engineers, and managers? No. The combined new jobs for these
middle class professional skills totaled 10,400. Employment services accounted for 42,000 of the jobs in “professional and business services” of which temporary help accounted for 28,500. “Education and health services” accounted for 34,000 jobs or which ambulatory and home health care services accounted for 28,000 of the jobs. The other old standby, waitresses and bartenders, accounted for 30,400 jobs. The number of Americans dependent on food stamps who cannot afford to go out to eat or to purchase a six-pack of beer has almost doubled, but the demand for restaurant meals and bar drinks keeps rising. There you have it. This is America’s “New Economy.” If the jobs exist at all, they consist of lowly paid, largely part-time employment that fails to produce enough income to prevent the food stamp rolls from doubling. Without growth in consumer income, there is no growth in aggregate consumer demand. Offshoring jobs also offshores the income associated with the jobs, resulting in the decline in the domestic consumer market. The US transnational corporations, pursuing profits in the short-run, are destroying their long-run consumer base. The transnational corporations are also destroying the outlook for US universities, as it makes no sense to incur large student loan debt when job prospects are poor. The corporations are also destroying US leadership in innovation as US corporations increasingly become marketeers of foreign-made goods and services. As I predicted in 2004, the US will have a third world work force in 20 years. The unemployment figures are as deceptive as the employment figures. The headline unemployment rate of 6.7% does not include discouraged workers. When discouraged workers are included among the unemployed, the US rate of unemployment is 3.4 times higher than the announced rate. How many times has John Williams written his report? How many times have I written this article? Yet the government continues to issue false reports, and the presstitute financial media continues to ask no questions. The US, once a land of opportunity, has been transformed into an aristocratic economy in which income and wealth are concentrated at the very top. The highly skewed concentration at the top is the result of jobs offshoring, which transformed Americans’ salaries and wages into bonuses for executives and capital gains for owners, and financial deregulation, which produced financial collapse and the Federal Reserve’s bailout of “banks too big too fail.” The trillions of dollars of new money created by
the Federal Reserve has produced massive inflation of stock prices, making owners even richer. Sooner or later the dollar’s value will suffer as a result of the massive creation of new dollars. When that occurs, the import-dependent American population will suffer a traumatic drop in living standards. The main cost of the bank bailout has yet to hit. As I write I cannot think of one thing in the entire areas of foreign and domestic policy that the US government has told the truth about in the 21st century. Just as Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Iran has no nukes, Assad did not use chemical weapons, and Putin did not invade and annex Crimea, the jobs numbers are fraudulent, the unemployment rate is deceptive, the inflation measures are understated, and the GDP growth rate is overstated. Americans live in a matrix of total lies. What can Americans do? Elections are pointless. Presidents, Senators, and US Representatives represent the interest groups that provide their campaign funds, not the voters. In two decisions, the Republican Supreme Court has made it legal for corporations to purchase the government. Those who own the government will decide what it does, not those who vote. All Americans can do is to accept the serfdom imposed on them or take to the streets and stay in the streets despite being clubbed, tasered, arrested, and shot by the police, who protect the power structure, not the public. In America, nothing is done for the public. But everything is done to the public.
Five Signs That The Global Economic Recovery May Be An Illusion Larry Elliot theguardian.com April 6, 2014
Many policymakers believe the worst is over, but is this just 'groupthink'? And which warnings might the IMF miss this time?
The global economy seemed to be on the mend when the International Monetary Fund met for its spring meeting in Washington 10 years ago. Alan Greenspan had cut official interest rates in the US to 1% after the collapse of the dotcom boom and the world's biggest economy had responded to the treatment. Gordon Brown was chancellor of the exchequer and the UK was in its 12th year of uninterrupted growth. Companies in the west were flocking to China now that it was part of the World Trade Organisation. The talk was of offshoring, just-in-time global supply chains and integrated capital markets. The expectation was that the good times would last for ever. No serious thought was given to the notion that total system failure was just around the corner. Faith in the self-correcting properties of open markets was absolute. When the crash duly came, a self-flagellating IMF confessed that it had been guilty of groupthink. It had either ignored the signs of trouble or played down their significance when it did spot them. The fund has learned some hard lessons from this experience. Downside risks to the forecasts in its halfyearly World Economic Outlook (WEO) are now exhaustively catalogued. The world of 2014 is not dissimilar to that of 2004. The boost provided by cheap money has got the global economy moving. Inflation as measured by the cost of goods and services is low but asset prices are starting to hum. Financial markets have got their mojo back. Deals are being done, big bonuses paid. The received wisdom is that the worst is over and that the prospects for the global economy will strengthen as the remaining problems are ironed out. Some analysts believe that the Great Moderation – the period of low inflation and continual expansion – has returned after the hiatus caused by the crash. The optimists could be right. Recessions tend to be the exception rather than the norm and countries eventually revert to a trend rate of growth. In the UK it is 2% or so; in the US it is a bit higher; in the eurozone a bit lower. This could be the start of a long global upswing built on technological change and the advent of middle-class spending power in fast-growing emerging market economies. Or it could be another case of groupthink. Imagine, therefore, that in five years' time the IMF is doing its postmortem on another period of global turbulence. What will it say were the warning signs missed during 2014? Here are five to be going on with. The first will doubtless feature in the WEO due to be published on Tuesday: the global economy's dependency on exceptionally low interest rates. Since peaking in the 1970s, the trough in interest rates has been lower in each subsequent cycle and they are now barely above zero. Countries such as Britain and the US have only been able to revert to their trend rate of growth through periods of looser and looser monetary policy. As Adair Turner noted in his lecture to the Cass Business School in February, this has averted the threat of secular stagnation – but at a price. The recovery engineered by Greenspan was a case of "the hair of the dog", and the same applies in spades to the one since the Great Recession of 2008-09. The second threat is a bond market crash as the world's central banks try to return monetary policy to a more normal setting. Central banks are adopting a cautious approach to this process, with the Federal
Reserve gradually reducing the amount of bonds it buys under the quantitative easing programme and the Bank of England using forward guidance to reassure borrowers that any increase in official interest rates will be modest and gradual. It is assumed that central banks can pull off the normalisation of monetary policy relatively painlessly. But that was the received wisdom a decade ago when Greenspan finally started to edge up borrowing costs. The Fed had failed to spot the colossal bubble building up in the housing market and the vulnerability of sub-prime borrowers to the falling real estate prices caused by tighter policy. The reason bond markets need to be watched is simple. By buying large numbers of bonds, central banks have increased their price. The yield (interest rate) on a bond moves inversely to its price, so as bond prices go up the yield goes down. When the time comes to sell the bonds back to the market, the opposite should happen. The greater supply of bonds will depress bond prices and raise their yield. If there were to be a rush to the exit, the increase in bond yields would be swift and painful. In some respects, crashing bond markets are a too-obvious threat. A real black-swan event contains the element of surprise, so it is worth looking around to see if there is a bubble out there that everybody is missing, something so obvious it is staring us in the face. How about fracking? The assumption is that the solution to the world's energy needs lies in shale oil and gas, which is why investment has been piling into the sector. Yet the Oil & Gas Journal reported last month that 15 major companies have written off $35bn in investment since the boom began. Getting oil and gas out of the ground is proving costlier and less profitable than expected. So the third threat is that fracking proves to be the new subprime. Finally, there are two slow-burn problems that the world ignores at its peril. In an interview with the Guardian last week, Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, warned of the risk of resource conflicts within the next five to 10 years unless the international community gets serious about dealing with global warming. The catalogue of extreme weather events – from floods in the UK to droughts in Australia – is growing. The inaction of policymakers on climate change is the same as Greenspan's on asset-price bubbles: deal with the problem if it arises. We all know how that ended. Kim also says that action needs to be taken against rising inequality. So does the IMF's managing director, Christine Lagarde. For the first three decades after the second world war, the global economy was by and large the story of a rising tide lifting all boats. That is no longer the case, with a tiny elite now grabbing the lion's share of global growth. At the bottom, and increasingly for those in the middle as well, it is a case of wage squeezes, high unemployment, debt, austerity and poverty. The 85 richest people on the planet own the same wealth as half the world's population but seem oblivious to the risk of widespread social unrest. So, of course, were the Bourbons and the Romanovs.
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