Oct 01 2009
Server Hopefully Fixed
Sorry for being off-air most of the day. The good folks at Hosting Matters have us moved to a larger server now so we should be good for a while. We thank them very much for helping out on such short notice.
Fingers crossed we have the problem fixed. Again, any donations would be appreciated (upper right Pay Pal icon).
Cheers, AJStrata
Something to watch for tomorrow morning – late this afternoon it was reported that some big market players are expecting the unemployment numbers due out tomorrow at 8:30 am to be significantly worse than expected.
If true, the news could set up an ugly Friday on Wall Street on the heels of today’s 200 point drop.
This “recovery” isn’t playing out the way the official script says it’s supposed to.
What boggles me about the unemployment numbers is the Obama administration trying to pretend that decreases in job losses are a good thing. Sorry but we need some job creation. As long as we have jobs being lost we lose payroll tax, social security, and medicare revenue. The Democrats want all these programs but we are still hemorrhaging jobs and it is the tax revenues from those jobs that fund those programs.
We MUST put a stop to this. The Democrats are going to ruin this country.
Okay – the unemployment number was massively worse than expected by Wall Street. Employers were forecast to have cut 180,000 jobs; the actual number is minus 263,000 and official unemployment now stands at 9.8%, the worst number since July of 1983. (unofficial unemployment, of course, is nearly double that)
July and August numbers were also revised downwards. Some have suggested this means that current job losses were even higher but that the emotional impact is lessoned when part of the loss can be shifted to previous months. You mean the government changes and back-calculates its previously reported official data, you ask? Why yes they do, constantly.
There was some initial optimism over the reported rise in consumer spending in August. After mining into the data, however, most analysts are now agreeing that this was caused by the Cash For Clunkers program. Cash For Clunkers was only good for the economy when looked at very superficially; this is the perfect example of why this program was yet another long term catastrophe. September Auto Sales numbers show an extremely steep drop, supporting those who say that the program did *not* create any new sales; it just pulled potential sales out of the last 4 months of the year and moved them all into August. Given the increasingly bad jobs numbers, it looks as though the price of the Cash For Clunkers program is going to be a steep drop in consumer spending in September and October, maybe beyond. Even Walmart is dramatically curtailing it’s pre-season merchandising buys, as their internal reports indicate that this may be the worst Christmas shopping season in 30 years.
Not only is the “Great Recession” not over, it’s just getting started.
Thanks AJ (tiny clink).