Unemployment

The Wall Street Journal's Stu Woo reports on how Amazon ramps up for the Christmas selling season in a much-read write-up for the paper with a focus on the thoughts of holiday season workers like 75-year old Ray Williams and his wife…

Imagine if/when this becomes scalable. Another potential example of the structural change taking place in the labor force.

The stereotype of lazy southern Europe and the hard working North is just not reflected in the data. We came across this BLS data set over the weekend which was very enlightening and, in part, smashes this widely held generalization.

If this doesn’t convince you we’re on the elbow of the technology exponential curve, nothing will. Stay tuned, it’s going to be interesting next 20 years!

Here’s some interesting data from the Atlantic that shouldn’t have surprised us, but was an eye opener, nonetheless. The U.S. Federal payrolls are dominated by men and state and local government by women.

Here’s a great chart from the BLS showing the collapse of construction employment from May 2006-10. No surprise the largest declines are in the four housing bubble states — Nevada, Arizona, Florida, and California. Stunning employment in…

Michael Hudson was on RT's Capital Account with Lauren Lyster, speaking about the loss of democracy that has accompanied the global financial crisis. The video is below, but recently Michael also wrote two articles for the Frankfurter…

A breakdown of employment gains and losses by industry plus an excerpt of what the BLS had to say about this morning’s employment report

As often is the case, economic data can be a bit of a Rorschach test, in that reasonable people can see and value different aspects of the report. This holds for today's US employment report. The headlines were good--140k private sector…

Bottom line: the numbers are decent but they beat expectations. Markets are in a bullish end of year tape painting frame of mind, so stocks will rally. Daddy needs a bonus so Santa is indeed coming to town. The Santa Claus rally is on.