Here it is, Friday, September 7, 2007, and the stock market is continuing to decline. But not because of the continuing mortgage debacle, mind you! Now it's employment that is dragging down the hulk of the Bushtanic.
A report from the Labor Department shows that 4,000 jobs were lost compared to the previous month instead of the 100,000 new jobs expected to be created. This news wasn't assuaged by the news that the numbers of new jobs that were created in the previous two months were reduced by 81,000, leaving little headroom for a decline in employment. The July payroll increase was revised 24,000 lower, while the June increase was also cut by 57,000 from its previous reading, the second time - (ahem) THE SECOND TIME the June increase has been reduced. This is why one shouldn't believe the initial boasts of the Bush administration when the numbers go up. They are lying for effect!
Let's see what The Wall Street Economic Socialists have to say about this decline in market indices:
Eliot Spar, market strategist at Stifel Nicolaus & Co., wrote, "This employment report is shocking to most Wall Street observers but not to the thousands that have been thrown out of work in the housing and mortgage industries."
Paul Mendelsohn, chief investment officer with Windham Financial, notes that "This indicates we may already be going into a recession."
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is in the mood to deliver an economic history lesson at an economic conference organized by the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Bubbles can't be defused through incremental adjustments in interest rates, he observed. "The behavior in what we are observing in the last seven weeks is identical in many respects to what we saw in 1998, what we saw in the stock-market crash of 1987, I suspect what we saw in the land-boom collapse of 1837 and certainly [the bank panic of] 1907," lectured Professor Greenspan.
Maybe the lecture subject should be another topic. Jesse Jackson - whose recent political pedigree leaves much to be desired - makes a plea for the pet government of the investor class to turn their eyes back toward their native land and Invest in US! There are advantages for the investor class to put their money to work in America, or else the Russian steel maker Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Work wouldn't have heeded the sales pitch delivered to them by Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher and decide to build a new plant in Scioto County.
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Article comments
1 - Dave Nalle
And yet out in the real world, rather than the 'realist' fantasy world, jobs remain unfilled, companies are desperate for qualified employees and the economy is suffering not because of meaningless, insignificant job loss, but because of growth held back by an increasingly critical labor shortage.
Dave
2 - Al Barger
Taking his writings as a whole, The Realist has no discernable interest in actual reality, but only in some kind of combo anti-Bush/anti-American nonsense that he knows is true because he feels it very strongly. He seems to be hoping and praying desperately for some apocalypse to punish US for being wealthy and successful.
But this faux sophisticated market analysis doesn't have jack squat to do with the real world. Give or take a few thousand jobs this month or last, unemployment is in the 4% range - which is generally considered full employment, as there are always a few people unemployable, or between jobs or whatever.
The DJIA was off some 249 points today - but as recently as three or four months ago, that would have still been a record high. Only a moron or somebody with a burning desire to see US failure would go to ridiculous gloom and doom like this over a one day drop in the market. That's about as dumb as picking out one particularly hot summer day and emphatically citing it as proof of global warming.
Still, the "Realist" can cross his fingers and pray for an economic collapse. Maybe he'll even get lucky, and we turn the country over to John Edwards or some such who can do something to really hurt the economy.
3 - Dr Dreadful
I never comment on Realist's posts... oh. I guess this is a first, then.
I just find them unreadable. You can't go more than half a sentence without him linking to something, which makes it next to impossible to concentrate. By the time you've read whatever it is he wanted you to click on, you've forgotten what he was talking about in the first place.
So I have to ask: Dave, do you actually know for sure that he is talking crap, or do you just get bogged down in his links the same way I do?
:-)
4 - Clavos
I ignore 'em and just read the crap.
It's crap, alright.
5 - Dr Dreadful
Well, Clav, his focus seems to be the economy, which as everyone knows, politicans can do #@$! all about.
One more reason why I don't pay much attention.
Damn! Posted again!
6 - Dave Nalle
So I have to ask: Dave, do you actually know for sure that he is talking crap, or do you just get bogged down in his links the same way I do?
Let's just say that he selects his sources with great care. He's willing to reference any nutjob or partisan blowhard who supports his position, no matter how questionable they are. And when he does link to a fact, he does his best to eliminate the context and spin it to support his thesis.
Take his second to last paragraph, for example. It's based on a pair of false premises. The first is that the relatively small number of people losing their homes is some sort of nationwide or worldwide disaster, which it clearly isn't - even for the people involved. The second is his ridiculous attempt to blame Bush for the problem, which he had absolutely nothing to do with.
I've also noticed that he seems to always wait to post these things on the day when there was a stockmarket dip, so he can say that the market is plunging based on one day of results, not mentioning that it comes at the end of 3 weeks of pretty steady growth, or that the point to which it just dropped represents a 17% increase in value over the same point last year. Take a look at the market on a chart which has a span of a year or more and the occasional day of decline is totally lost in a clear ongoing upward pattern.
Dave
7 - Clavos
Take a look at the market on a chart which has a span of a year or more and the occasional day of decline is totally lost in a clear ongoing upward pattern.
An overall pattern (with dips, some significant and fairly prolonged, to be sure) that has lasted for about seventy years.
8 - REMF
I disagree with comment numbers 1, 2, 4 and 6.
9 - Clavos
You missed one, emmy.
#7 is mine, also.
10 - REMF
No I didn't Clavvy. I don't disagree with 7.
11 - Clavos
Hey, Realist,
How did the the Dow do today, September 18th?