Festivus For The Rest Of Us: 893,000 Added To The Unemployments Rolls

12-16-2010 • Market-ticker.org

Now that's a nasty number. +893,000?! Uh, wow. And the bad news is where it is showing up - the majority of this is in new claims in the regular state figures. The roll into EUC continues but that +548 up above says that a huge percentage of the people who claimed in the last few weeks "stuck" - that is, there were no material roll-offs from people finding jobs in the weeks leading up to Black Friday. Remember folks, claims is a "fuzzy" number. It tells you who claimed but it doesn't tell you who found jobs. Well, now we know. And now we also know where the unemployment stats for November, where we lost an actual 500,000 jobs on the household survey, came from. Incidentally, about the top line on this post? There was an interesting exchange right after the report was released on CNBS - I actually heard a tiny bit of recognition that perhaps, just perhaps, all this crap that the government and Fed have been running aren't working - and can't - from the likes of Liesman. Oh, and yesterday morning there was caught by a few astute watchers what appeared to be a clear reference to my work over here on the same channel at about 6:00 AM.. .of course it's not in the video archive as it was one of those "quip" things between "segments." But then, right on cue at 8:00, the idiocy returns with "we're seeing a slowly-improving job market."