Thread: Consumer Confidence Rose SHARPLY After Obama's Election In 2009

Originally Posted by bajisima

Will be interesting to check back in a year or two. Heard a pundit the other day claim that blue collar factory jobs will come back and really pick up but white collar work will diminish under Trump. Cited something to do with the reduction in visa programs.

Amazing the difference a few months can make, isn't it?

Some RW poster in another thread just today told us we couldn't blame Trump for something which I don't remember now, since he has only been there a couple of months. But of course, that doesn't apply to good news.

Plus I would have thought that everyone knows (except Trump and bannon, they know nothing) that employment is a lagging indicator.

Trump welcomes government jobs report he once derided - BBC News

Trump welcomes government jobs report he once derided

US President Donald Trump has hailed the federal government's latest positive job figures, which he once denounced as "phony" and a "joke".

The US economy added 235,000 new jobs in February, Mr Trump's first full month in office.
He retweeted a news report with the caption: "GREAT AGAIN".

During a campaign speech last August, Mr Trump called the Department of Labor numbers one of the "biggest hoaxes in American modern politics".

Originally Posted by Libertine

It certainly yields a better view of the the state of the Obamaconomy. Declining economic growth rates and declining consumer confidence. After year after year of disappointing economic progress, Americans were giving up all hope.

And when did the obstructionist Republican controlled Congress blossom?

Originally Posted by RNG

Amazing the difference a few months can make, isn't it?

Some RW poster in another thread just today told us we couldn't blame Trump for something which I don't remember now, since he has only been there a couple of months. But of course, that doesn't apply to good news.

Plus I would have thought that everyone knows (except Trump and bannon, they know nothing) that employment is a lagging indicator.

Trump welcomes government jobs report he once derided - BBC News

Lagging by eight years, that's funny.

Originally Posted by RNG

And when did the obstructionist Republican controlled Congress blossom?

Right after Americans gave Dems a big thumbs down at the polls.

Originally Posted by Libertine

Bad link, copyright violation and a bunch of lies.

There weren't over 2 million jobs created in 2016, only 1.6 million which was lower than 2015's almost 2 million, which was lower than 2014's almost 2.5 million. Can you see the decline there, just like the decline in economic growth over the same period and the decline in consumer confidence over the same period. Every economic indicator you look at was headed down during the last few years of the Obamaconomy.




Data extracted on: March 10, 2017 (2:14:35 PM)

Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey

Series Id: LNS12000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Employment Level
Labor force status: Employed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over


Download:
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2007 146028(1) 146057 146320 145586 145903 146063 145905 145682 146244 145946 146595 146273
2008 146378(1) 146156 146086 146132 145908 145737 145532 145203 145076 144802 144100 143369
2009 142152(1) 141640 140707 140656 140248 140009 139901 139492 138818 138432 138659 138013
2010 138438(1) 138581 138751 139297 139241 139141 139179 139438 139396 139119 139044 139301
2011 139250(1) 139394 139639 139586 139624 139384 139524 139942 140183 140368 140826 140902
2012 141584(1) 141858 142036 141899 142206 142391 142292 142291 143044 143431 143333 143330
2013 143225(1) 143315 143319 143603 143856 144006 144318 144304 144466 143577 144536 144741
2014 145055(1) 145102 145715 145673 145819 146222 146461 146501 146845 147426 147361 147521
2015 148061(1) 148108 148244 148522 148792 148742 148890 149092 148932 149255 149419 150030
2016 150533(1) 151043 151301 151028 151058 151090 151546 151655 151926 151902 152048 152111

Sigh. Here we go again. You are not even using the correct data-set if you are trying to ask the question how many new jobs were created in the year 2016. This alone reveals your status as a rank amateur, trying to dabble in issues that you don't have a fucking CLUE about. You are NOT taking into account the constant flows into and out of the labor force. There is incredible CHURN in the American labor market, from month to month, as some people enter the labor force, while others leave, some permanently, some temporarily. So simply taking the difference between the December 2016 number of employed persons and the January 2016 number of employed persons, which is what you are doing here, will NOT give you the number of new jobs.

How DO you get the number of new jobs created in a year? Why, from the MONTHLY jobs reports, of course. Like the one that came out a week ago from yesterday, and that you were likely crowing about, because it WAS a good and robust jobs report, with 235,000 new jobs created in February 2017. Here is a link which takes you a table of BLS data for the past several years, a summary of the monthly jobs reports, and using the final revision for each month (quite helpful!):

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0...utput_view=net...

Now, go down to the last row of the data, the data for the year 2016, and simply ADD up the number of new jobs created in each month. What number do you get? You SHOULD get 2.24 million new jobs created in 2016. Which happens to be what both I and The Atlantic claimed: that more than two million new jobs were created last year. Contrary to your FALSE claim that only 1.6 million new jobs were created. Your ERROR is 'only' about 33%.

If this is not enough to expose your stupidity in how you are doing your 'calculations', I can also quote from the Saturday/Sunday edition of The Wall Street Journal which came out after that last jobs report, the issue dated March 11-12, 2017. The front page main story was titled "Job Growth Clears the Way for Fed" [to raise interest rates, which they did the following Wednesday]. The article continues onto page A2, and one finds this interesting paragraph:

"The overall pace of hiring has picked up a bit in early 2017, with payroll growth averaging 237,000 over the first two months of the year, compared with a monthly average of 187,000 for all of 2016." [Emphasis added by LeRoy.]

A monthly average of 187,000 new jobs for all of 2016. Now, how would you go about getting the TOTAL for the year from that monthly average? Would you, uh, just multiply by 12? To account for the fact that there are 12 months in the year? Yes. Yes, that is what you would do. And here it is:

12 months/year x 187,000 new jobs/month = 2,244,000 new jobs for the entire year of 2016.

You see, what the WSJ reports is PERFECTLY CONSISTENT with what BOTH I AND The Atlantic have been TRYING to tell you.

I think I will let other people decide if they want to agree with me, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.......or if they would rather agree with you, rank amateur who doesn't have a clue as to what he is talking about.

I would ask for an apology, but I know, of course, that none would be forthcoming. One might as well ask for an apology from Donald Trump!

Damn, I don't know WHY the stupid link in the previous post did not work. Here is the table of BLS data I am referring to. It is really not hard to find:


1-Month Net Change
Series Id: CES0000000001
Seasonally Adjusted
Series Title: All employees, thousands, total nonfarm, seasonally adjusted
Super Sector: Total nonfarm
Industry: Total nonfarm
NAICS Code: -
Data Type: ALL EMPLOYEES, THOUSANDS


Download: Download as an Excel File
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2007 240 89 190 80 143 75 -34 -20 88 84 114 98
2008 17 -84 -78 -210 -186 -162 -213 -267 -450 -474 -766 -694
2009 -793 -702 -823 -687 -349 -471 -329 -213 -220 -204 -2 -275
2010 23 -68 164 243 524 -137 -68 -36 -52 262 119 87
2011 43 189 225 346 77 225 69 110 248 209 141 209
2012 358 237 233 78 115 76 143 177 203 146 132 244
2013 211 286 130 197 226 162 122 261 190 212 258 47
2014 190 151 272 329 246 304 202 230 280 227 312 255
2015 234 238 86 262 344 206 254 157 100 321 272 239
2016 126 237 225 153 43 297 291 176 249 124 164 155
2017 238(P) 235(P)
P : preliminary

But won't format well this way, I know.

The data also show that 2.744 million new jobs were created in the year 2015, and 3.015 million new jobs were created in 2014, which was the strongest year for job creation in America since 1999.

Originally Posted by RNG

Amazing the difference a few months can make, isn't it?

Some RW poster in another thread just today told us we couldn't blame Trump for something which I don't remember now, since he has only been there a couple of months. But of course, that doesn't apply to good news.

Plus I would have thought that everyone knows (except Trump and bannon, they know nothing) that employment is a lagging indicator.

Trump welcomes government jobs report he once derided - BBC News

Give him just another month or so, and we can expect that our brilliant President Trump will be claiming that he successfully reduced unemployment from 42% under President Obama, to 4.7% under President Trump, all in the space of just a few months. We can further expect that millions and millions of his drooling followers will IMMEDIATELY fall for that line of bullshit, hook, line, and sinker.

Originally Posted by OldGaffer

I guess it is nice to be left with a Democratic economy like Bush Junior and Trump and not a failed Republican economy like Clinton and Obama inherited

If you stopped trying to look at everything in black or white, Democrat or Republican terms, you might actually see just how ridiculous your statement here is. Do a little research and you will see that Clinton inherited an economy that was well into recovery. Being the great politician that he is, he played it perfectly and was able to paint Bush I as a failed president even though the country was steaming ahead at a good pace by the time the election came around. He did screw up with the Dotcom bubble and (with a lot of help from Barney Frank) helped to create the housing crisis that Bush II doubled down on. This is definitely something that Junior should take the blame for, but it was not something that he started. Fortunately, by the time that Obama took over, the recovery was well on its way...

Originally Posted by GoaTlOver

If you stopped trying to look at everything in black or white, Democrat or Republican terms, you might actually see just how ridiculous your statement here is. Do a little research and you will see that Clinton inherited an economy that was well into recovery. Being the great politician that he is, he played it perfectly and was able to paint Bush I as a failed president even though the country was steaming ahead at a good pace by the time the election came around. He did screw up with the Dotcom bubble and (with a lot of help from Barney Frank) helped to create the housing crisis that Bush II doubled down on. This is definitely something that Junior should take the blame for, but it was not something that he started. Fortunately, by the time that Obama took over, the recovery was well on its way...

I was nodding along, mostly agreeing with your post, until I got to your last statement. When Obama took over, in late January 2009, the entire world economy still appeared to be on the verge of the Second Great Depression. The world's entire financial system had gone into cardiac arrest, with banks refusing to lend EVEN TO OTHER BANKS, an EXTRAORDINARY situation. The recovery had by NO MEANS already begun at that point. The gloom did not start to lift until March and April of 2009.

Bush I. His problem was that he continually denied during 1991 that America was IN a recession, though it was pretty damn obvious to the rest of the country that we were. When he was finally willing to acknowledge that we were in a recession, he did it in a very awkward way, by saying that "We're enjoying a recession, and we're not enjoying it very much". Which sounds more like some mangled sentence his son George might have come up with. And then there was that telling incident when George H.W. went shopping, to try to encourage other Americans to do the same; and he expressed amazement at the laser bar-code scanner in the store. Well, they had been in stores for nearly half a decade. Americans were pretty amazed when they saw that on TV, decided that George H.W. needed to 'get out more', and made sure he did, by dis-electing him.

Not clear to me that Clinton 'screwed up with the Dotcom bubble'. What should he have done about it? It's an old, old pattern in economic history, people getting overly excited about some new technology, and bidding up stock prices to absurd and irrational levels in the process. Same thing happened in the 1920's, when everyone got very excited about radios, refrigerators, and automobiles, the gee-whiz technologies of THAT time. If ANYONE should have DONE something about the Dotcom bubble, here's who that someone was: Alan Greenspam. See, I can't even spell his name correctly; that last 'N' always turns into an 'M', no matter how hard I try to get it right. I'm blaming it on the 'M' and 'N' keys being right next to each other on the QWERTY keyboard, although that excuse doesn't work when I misspell the name of Mitt Rmoney.

Originally Posted by BigLeRoy

I was nodding along, mostly agreeing with your post, until I got to your last statement. When Obama took over, in late January 2009, the entire world economy still appeared to be on the verge of the Second Great Depression. The world's entire financial system had gone into cardiac arrest, with banks refusing to lend EVEN TO OTHER BANKS, an EXTRAORDINARY situation. The recovery had by NO MEANS already begun at that point. The gloom did not start to lift until March and April of 2009.

Bush I. His problem was that he continually denied during 1991 that America was IN a recession, though it was pretty damn obvious to the rest of the country that we were. When he was finally willing to acknowledge that we were in a recession, he did it in a very awkward way, by saying that "We're enjoying a recession, and we're not enjoying it very much". Which sounds more like some mangled sentence his son George might have come up with. And then there was that telling incident when George H.W. went shopping, to try to encourage other Americans to do the same; and he expressed amazement at the laser bar-code scanner in the store. Well, they had been in stores for nearly half a decade. Americans were pretty amazed when they saw that on TV, decided that George H.W. needed to 'get out more', and made sure he did, by dis-electing him.

Not clear to me that Clinton 'screwed up with the Dotcom bubble'. What should he have done about it? It's an old, old pattern in economic history, people getting overly excited about some new technology, and bidding up stock prices to absurd and irrational levels in the process. Same thing happened in the 1920's, when everyone got very excited about radios, refrigerators, and automobiles, the gee-whiz technologies of THAT time. If ANYONE should have DONE something about the Dotcom bubble, here's who that someone was: Alan Greenspam. See, I can't even spell his name correctly; that last 'N' always turns into an 'M', no matter how hard I try to get it right. I'm blaming it on the 'M' and 'N' keys being right next to each other on the QWERTY keyboard, although that excuse doesn't work when I misspell the name of Mitt Rmoney.

Again, black and white. The recession hit bottom well before the election. It may not have looked pretty, and the world was definitely in turmoil, but the bottom had been reached and everyone was working on climbing out. President Obama did not offer anything that helped at this point. He provided hope and change because he headed a new administration, but his policies and his "shovel ready jobs" were not what pulled the world back from the brink.