The Funny Farm

The Wheels Are Starting To Come Off

All sorts of goodies (cough) in this small example of Flying Bad News Under The Media Radar on Friday, March Job Gains Weakest in Eight Months. among the highlights (cough)*:

- Wall Street economists who are not Paul Krugman predicted 220,000 or so new jobs showing up in America in March. The actual number is somewhere around 110,000 - half of what they guesstimated, and less than the 155,000 or so needed to employ all of those just entering the job market. In other words, we've just added 45,000 or so job seekers to the pool of the unemployed. Good job! Now the rest of the worker bees will work that much harder knowing that more of their peers are seeking the same honey that they continue (for now) to get.

- in a move that comes as absolutely no surprise to the enterprising souls here at the Funny Farm News Burro, the Labor Department also revised the job creation estimates for the previous two months down a significant amount, from 262,000 in February and 132,000 in January to 243,000 in February and 128,000 in January. There's another 27,000 or so looking for work.

- overtime hours are shrinking, which these experts say is a leading indicator that job creation will not improve.

- The participation rate, the proportion of the population that either has a job or is looking for a job, remained at a 17-year low of 65.8 percent.

- The service sector, which has been the jobs-creating powerhouse, generated only 86,000 jobs in March, less than half the 191,000 that were created in February and the smallest for any month since last July when 71,000 jobs were added. Within the services sector, 9,700 retail jobs were lost last month, a sharp turnaround from February when retailers added 39,100 employees.

Is anyone else scared yet?

* - and, please, people - we would really like to see a glowing jobs report (didn't we used to see them once upon a time? Just asking...), a much better economy and not have to worry quite so much about political hypocrisy affecting our daily lives. So these are not really, per se, highlights so much as crucial information which will probably not be brought to the sheeple's attention. Plus, it's all about the sarcasm. Let's have some focus out there...

Posted by (: Tom :) at April 1, 2005 04:39 PM