9.1% Unemployment – the New Norm October 7, 2011
Posted by geoff in News.trackback
The unemployment rate for September was released today, and like the previous 2 months, it’s at 9.1%. We’ve been within 0.2 points of 9% since January, sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower, but essentially going nowhere. Just like Tim Geithner predicted 18 months ago:
Click me!
So when the Obama administration tells you things are “unexpected” or “worse than we thought,” remember that they’ve known exactly what would happen for 18 months. And they did nothing. Or at the least, they did nothing useful.
The funny part comes from the Household Survey, which reports that the number of employed people increased by 398K. But the number of people who are working part time due to economic reasons increased by 444K. Kind of swallows up that supposed progress.
The Establishment Survey says we gained 103K jobs. Weak, and not nearly enough to handle the 423K people who entered the workforce last month.
I hate to rain on Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s parade, but I’m starting to suspect that President Obama hasn’t turned the economy around.
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Innocent Bystanders 
Thanks, Geoff. Always look forward to your charts.
In the midst of the many distractions created by the media, I appreciate the steady look at this reliable indicator.
supposedly half of the “new” jobs were Verizon workers returning from strike…..how in hell can those be considered “new” jobs by anybody’s goofy ass accounting?
When I look at your excellent chart, Geoff, I see that Obama counted on the economy recovering whether he got the nearly $1 trilion stimulus or not.
He got it.
So he squandered it all on his buddies.
Then he and Timmy realized that it wasn’t going to recover by itself and they lowered expectations.
I think you nailed it, Nan.
>> When I look at your excellent chart, Geoff, I see that Obama counted on the economy recovering whether he got the nearly $1 trilion stimulus or not.
That’s exactly right.
That wormy little bastard Peter Orszag essentially said the same on Squawk Box this morning.
oh and geoffy, why no subtle gloating on your part re. the convergence of your green dot placement with Obama’s maroon dot placement…? Or did I just miss it? You letting the graph speak for itself…so to speak?
Those are Geithner’s dots, not mine.
Great chart geoff.
I always try to think of the moment when the chart was shown to Obama. Do you think he understood it, other than thinking, ‘that looks good.’?
We all know he doesn’t have the skill to ask an appropriate question about charts like this, let alone make a trillion dollar decision based on a line he doesn’t understand.
I’m just an engineer so I don’t understand anything but reality. It’s kind of a job requisite. Can someone explain this to me?
1. 11,616,000 unemployed (March 2009).
2. $860 billion dollar stimulus
3. 14,010,000 unemployed (August 2011).
The above come from the BLS.
Now to me that looks like we spent $860 billion dollars (not including cost of funds) and we now have 2,394,000 more unemployed people.
Another thing:
1. 153,716,000 was the total labor force in March of 2009.
2. 153,600,000 was the total labor force in August of 2011.
Again BLS numbers from their monthly reports.
That appears to be another loss of 116,000.
To me, that looks like there has been a total of 2,510,000 jobs since the grand plan of borrowing 860 billion dollars to fund public union and green jobs. What am I missing here? Because the really smart people like 0bama, Pelosi, reid, Wasserman Shultz tell me there have been 3 million jobs created since the first Americn Job Act known as The Stimulus was rammed through a democrat controlled congress.
Help.
*Shakes head sadly*
Another racist in denial.