What happened to all of the hype. For weeks, we've been subjected to continuous claims by Wall Street economist that the economy was recovering. We were told that in December, we were actually going to see a gain in employment. The government revised it's November numbers and claimed that we added 4,000 jobs. But then it admitted that the U.S. lost at least 85,000 jobs in the following month.
The Wall Street economist have argued that the decline in the rate of job loss is proof that the economy is getting better. They argue that we were losing 700,000 jobs in the beginning of 2009 and now that amount has declined. He's the problem with that argument. If the trend is going down then why did we see 85,000 more people lose their jobs. And if you examine how the government measure unemployment, you'll learn that hundreds of thousands of people have stopped losing for work. So this allows the government to excluded them from the unemployment counts and that's why the official unemployment number remained at 10%.
I think January is going to show another negative number because that is always the worst month and then it will be positive for the next 6 months after that at least because the census is supposed to really ramp up their hiring in late winter and spring 2010. Then once they are layed off in the middle of the summer the politicians won't be able to use those inflated numbers anymore.
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