Today’s employment numbers

From the BLS:

The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 9.4 percent in December, and nonfarm payroll employment increased by 103,000. Employment rose in leisure and hospitality and in health care but was little changed in other major industries.

Please don’t believe the hype. Unemployment went down because the labor participation rate went down. By that logic, we can stop including anyone without a job, and then the unemployment rate would be 0%. Just to put some numbers on it:

Assuming a reversion to the mean in the long-term average participation rate back to 66%, means that the civilian labor force, which in December came at 153,690, a drop of 260,000 from November, is in reality 157.6 million, a delta of 3.91 million currently unaccounted for. Maybe someone can ask Bernanke during his imminent presentation before Congress what happened to the unemployed population, which would have been 18.4 million if this labor force delta was incorporated, resulting in an unemployment rate of 11.7%.

Source: ZeroHedge.com

Fed day: Who cares?

Fed just released its long-awaited decision – no change. Wow!

The real news came out of China where we see 2 major developments. First, there’s a slowing of growth in imports. Guess what that did to commodity and commodity related stocks – yup, they’re all down. Of course, they were only up because some in the investor community believed that China would rise forever. Silly rabbit. The second piece of data is that real estate prices are rising at a slower rate. Now, with something on the order of millions of apartments supposedly sitting empty, I’m surprised they went up at all. What will happen when they actually start to decline? Well, look for more fake numbers from the government, social unrest from the people, and more pressure on resource related stocks that will have to start pricing in a deceleration in Chinese growth.

Lastly, productivity and labor costs (from BLS):

Productivity decreased 0.9 percent in the nonfarm business sector during the second quarter of 2010 as unit labor costs rose 0.2 percent (seasonally adjusted annual rates). In the manufacturing sector, productivity grew 4.5 percent while unit labor costs fell 6.1 percent.