"The World is Not Necessarily Falling Apart" (Jobs Report)

[Clio the Leo]

I'm paraphrasing from Erin Brown on MSNBC, sorry cant provide a link...

Job growth as bad as expected (as opposed to WORSE than expected) and hourly earning actually went up. Also, last month's numbers have NOT been revised as they usually are (to say that they were really worse than earlier reported.)

This is a good old fashioned example of "no news is good news." Brown seems relatively happy about the figures. They didn't get better, but the important thing, they didn't get WORSE. She cites as an example, someone making a big profit after selling one of Elliot Spitzer's properties in New York and says, "The world is not necessarily falling apart!"

And our boy Joe, who's Chicken Little stock market diatribe was interrupted by Brown's report says, "So, we've had several days in a row of things not being too bad..." :)

[AllentownJake]

1. People need to be patient

It took us 30 years of bad choices and two really bad leaders to get into this mess, we aren't getting out in 2 months.

[livetohike]

3. Not only that, but too many people equate the stock market

numbers with the actual economy. President Obama is fixing things for the long term. Investments should be for the long term. Day traders are not investors. I wish the MSM would educate people for a change instead of running around screaming how the sky is falling. (Rant over)

[AllentownJake]

4. Well the 401(k)

was the dumbest fucking thing ever created. It shifted retirement funds out of bonds which actually provide capital for companies to do things to the stock market which is little more than a casino.

Unless you are purchasing an IPO the only thing you are buying is a baseball card. Some stocks pay dividends but that being the reason to buy stocks died out when people became focused on asset appreciation. People wanted to get rich quick.

The problem is you got a lot of baby boomers who did the right thing and did what they were told would make them safe in their retirement watching it evaporate before their eyes.

Thank God, W never got his hands on Social Security.

[livetohike]

5. Count me in as one of those boomers

It did allow us to retire early, move back to PA and be out of debt. But now, we are both looking for jobs.

W couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time, so since he was so focused on creating war, he had no chance to ruin Social Security. Thank God.

[AllentownJake]

6. Yep they sold you a lie and robbed you of your retirement

I think the last con was to get social security. The conservative agenda ever since FDR was to destroy the middle class. Funny thing is they used the middle class to do it.

[marshall]

9. My younger friends think the world is going down the toilet

It's so depressing to talk to them--they think will never get better, that they will always be struggling to make ends meet and never have enough money. I try to talk them out of it. Only time will heal their wounds.

[Demeter]

2. Oh, Really?

Don't get out much, do they?

[Pharlo]

7. Well, I'll bet if Brown's job were one of the

'bad', but not 'worse' numbers, she wouldn't be so 'relatively happy about the figures'.

[Clio the Leo]

8. More morsels of goodness......

If you want to find some hopeful news in today’s employment report — and it isn’t easy — you can focus on two things. First, job cuts are not accelerating. The economy lost 651,000 jobs last month, compared with 655,000 in January and 681,000 in December. The latest report on weekly unemployment claims was consistent with this picture; it suggested that layoffs slowed slightly in late February. But this is a notoriously volatile measure.

Second, workers who have held onto their jobs continue to receive pay raises. The average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers, who make up about four-fifths of the work force, rose 3.6 percent over the last year. That’s down only slightly from the 4 percent increases that workers were receiving a couple of years ago. How could this be? Sticky wages.

Work hours have been reduced over that span, so the averagely weekly pay rose only 2.1 percent. But inflation has been roughly zero over the last year. Strange as it sounds, most workers have received a raise — and a pretty decent inflation-adjusted raise — over the last year. Given what’s happened to the value of retirement accounts lately, that is certainly better than the alternative.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/more-on-jobs-including-a-little-good-news/