"Jobless claims up, retail sales dip unexpectedly?" What do these numbers mean? (payment, work)

[caldvn]

Jobless claims up, retail sales dip unexpectedly - Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Fed-says-economy-leveling-new-apf-1948834182.html?x=0&.v=7 - broken link)

"The Labor Department said initial claims increased to a seasonally adjusted 558,000, from 554,000 the previous week. Analysts expected new claims to drop to 545,000, according to Thomson Reuters."

If I see every month 500k+ job loss each month, would that equal 3+ million for the past 6 months that people have lost jobs? How does signs of the economy improve if there are still jobs being lost?

If my assumption is that 3 milion people lost their jobs, and let's "hypothetically" say that there are 4 million total working people, 3 million just lost their jobs leaving 1 million people working. The last 1 million is not likely to lose their jobs. Therefore next month will have zero job losses. This doesn't mean it's the end of the recession, just ran out of people to lay off?

Most likely I'm misunderstanding how these numbers work.

[zz4guy]

The president and congress are out to lunch on this issue. Instead of addressing the elephant inthe room they're worried about passing their cluster-fu** of a health care plan. Next year we will see tax rates for everybody start to rise when Bush tax cuts expire. And capital gains will go up as well. Not to mention the cost of our debt right now will make mroe taxes inevitable. Businesses are shaving costs in preperation for an even bigger recession next year.

[rkcarguy]

I like to look at it as another individual called it, the dead cat bounce.

[nicet4]

It means, as I predicted it would, Obama's policies are failing and failing miserably.

The "Other Peoples Cash for Clunkers" programs caused people to ramp up car buying but when they did they cut elsewhere... in retail spending.

Unintended consequences, it happens often.

Economy "getting better" and the "recession is over"? Are people in Washington spewing this gutterage lunatics? Of course the pain isn't over and I for one don't believe we hit the low point yet. Not even close.

Risk of Second Recession

"It is a matter of risk and responsibility, and I think the risks that were there before, these problems are still there. We still have a very high level of debt, we still have leadership that's literally incompetent ..."It you think that's harsh, WATCH THE VIDEO:

Fed Faces Its Zimbabwe Moment (Forbes)

That purchase of government debt looked particularly ominous. Creating new money to buy government debt is the sort of strategy that's known to destroy economies--just ask Zimbabwe, which suffered so much hyperinflation that it destroyed its currency. The Zimbabwe central bank printed bills in the denomination of 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, then found they had value only as a novelty item on eBay. Eventually, Zimbabwe was forced to abandon its currency altogether.


But the difference between the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (one would hope) is that the Federal Reserve will stop before it wrecks the dollar.

[eek]

let them spew it if it can help stop businesses from panicking and if it can prevent hiring freezes.

the elephant in the room IS the job market, or lack thereof.

next year they're planning on working on immigration reform, however. nothing has been mentioned about helping the job market.

if 500k ppl a month lose jobs and have lost jobs since at least 2007 or so, um...
do ppl consider the number of new grads and past grads that are still looking as well?

where will the jobs come from? how? when????

[nicet4]

Originally Posted by eek

next year they're planning on working on immigration reform, however. nothing has been mentioned about helping the job market.

It's BECAUSE THEY CAN'T!

People need to wake to the reality there's very little the government can do to better the situation but there's a whole lot they can do to screw it up.

Look at the people in Washington. Obama has never worked in private business, he knows nothing about running a private business, the people around him have never worked in private business and most have never owned a private business unless it is consulting with government.

The people in congress are even more ignorant when it comes to business. They're stupid. It's pitiful.

Why do Americans look to these idiots for advice or expect them to "help"?

Sheila Jackson Lee would be homeless living in a cardboard box but for the idiots in her district that voted her in. You expect her to help business out? Heck she hates business and people in business. This dingbat is just stupid. You can't fix stupid.

[desertsun41]

Well first of all this govt only just admitted we were in a recession last December when in fact the recession was already 2 years old at that point. Today we are in a complete depression by every neutual respected standard of measure.

All those unemployment figures this govt puts out is all lies. Any one can twist numbers to favor the desired results. As the unemployment gets worse and worse, this govt twists more numbers so the UI figures dont look as bad. They dont even count the self employed, the commissioned workers, those who UI ran out and those who simply gave up looking for work. Is that fair? Is that the "true" figure of the unemployed?

[texdav]

Pools now show the deficit is the #1 issue with the public. I think unless they start working on the spending the recession will be prolonged.People just lack confidence that anyhting is being done after spending over 800 bilion of fixes in a alittle over 7 months.Funny how 3 billion in cash for clunkers is the only money paying off: but they how have dealers saying the admnisdtrtion can't get their act togther delaying payment.Geithner better get his act togther or he isn't long for his job.