Unemployment

by Annaly Capital Management Plenty has already been written about last week’s nonfarm payroll data. Many have pointed out the weakness underlying the relatively strong +151,000 headline number: the household survey (which feeds the…

by Comstock Partners The headline numbers for changes in non-farm payroll employment are significantly overstated according to our examination of the data in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website. This occurs as a result of the…

I was on RT TV America last Friday talking about the jobs report. The video from that discussion is below (it runs about 5 minutes).  Here's the deal: The US is in the midst of a technical recovery that has been on-going for about…

The following is a post I wrote earlier today at Naked Capitalism. I liked Ed's piece on QE called Does Ben Bernanke Believe The Stuff He Writes?. What caught my eye was his line, "As for monetary policy, while QE does not create new…

Paul Davidson argues that the Obama Administration and its allies in Congress have not actually followed the prescriptions laid out by the British economist Lord Keynes in making economic policy – and that this is a principal reason for…

By Dr. Lacy Hunt, Hoisington Investment Mgt. Co. The October employment situation was dramatically weaker than the headline 159k increase in the payroll employment measure. The broader household employment fell 330k. The only reason that…

The US jobs data headline, details and Sept revision were better than expected and although the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, the take away is net constructive and caps a week in which the US data has generally been better than…

Highlights The US dollar is trading with a firmer tone after selling off subsequent the announcement of QEII and weakening for the past two days.  An unexpected fall in eurozone retails sales added to the downside of the euro. …

by Michael Pettis In the debate about global trade imbalances, we often hear it said that because Americans produce nothing that China exports to the US, any move to restrict Chinese imports to the US would have no employment effect on…

The ADP number is higher than expected and is the last piece of major economic data we will see before the Fed's FOMC meeting announcement.  I am not sure whether the Fed will have seen the Labor Department number, but these jobs data…