Employers Cut 533K Jobs in November, Most in 34 Years
December 5th, 2008Via: AP:
Skittish employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years, catapulting the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent, dramatic proof the country is careening deeper into recession.
The new figures, released by the Labor Department Friday, showed the crucial employment market deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid clip, and handed Americans some more grim news right before the holidays.
As companies throttled back hiring, the unemployment rate bolted from 6.5 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month, a 15-year high.
Job losses were widespread, hitting factories, construction companies, financial firms, retailers, leisure and hospitality, and others industries. The few places where gains were logged included the government, education and health services.
The loss of 533,000 payroll jobs was much deeper than the 320,000 job cuts economists were forecasting. The rise in the unemployment rate, however, wasn’t as steep as the 6.8 percent rate they were expecting. Taken together, though, the employment picture was dismal.
The job reductions were the most since a whopping 602,000 positions were slashed in December 1974, when the country was in a severe recession.
Job losses in September and October also turned out to be much worse. Employers cut 403,000 jobs in September, versus 284,000 previously estimated. Another 320,000 were chopped in October, compared with an initial estimate of 240,000.
Employers are slashing costs to the bone as they try to cope with sagging appetites from customers in the U.S. and in other countries, which are struggling with their own economic troubles.
The carnage — including the worst financial crisis since the 1930s — is hitting a wide range of companies.
In recent days, household names like AT&T Inc., DuPont, JPMorgan Chase & Co., as well as jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp., and mining company Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. announced layoffs.
Fighting for their survival, the chiefs of Chrysler LLC, General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. will return Friday to Capitol Hill to again ask lawmakers for as much as $34 billion in emergency aid.
“The loss of 533,000 payroll jobs was much deeper than the 320,000 job cuts economists were forecasting.”
You mean anybody still takes seriously what these dogmatic dipshits have to say? By now, the credibility of that occupation should be considered somewhere between that of used car salesmen and those Nigerian scam artists whose generous offers my email box is always clogged with.
Now wait, I say, now waaaaait a minute there, son. Not ALL economists. Too bad that the Austrian School of Economics has largely been ignored (Ron Paul included). It was my reading of the Austrian Business Cycle theory that got me moving in the right direction since 1998, and they’ve been warning of this impending mess (the “crack-up boom”), only to be dismissed by the Keynesians (hisssssss!), who are fucking up royally by throwing more credit at a nightmare caused by an excess of credit.
Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argued that a credit-induced boom must eventually “lead to a crack-up boom.” He wrote, “The boom can last only as long as the credit expansion progresses at an ever-accelerated pace. The boom comes to an end as soon as additional quantities of fiduciary media are no longer thrown upon the loan market. But it could not last forever even if inflation and credit expansion were to go on endlessly. It would then encounter the barriers which prevent the boundless expansion of circulation credit. It would lead to the crack-up boom and the breakdown of the whole monetary system.”
He warned, “The credit expansion boom is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.” He stated that, “If the credit expansion is not stopped in time, the boom turns into the crack-up boom; the flight into real values begins, and the whole monetary system founders. Continuous inflation (credit expansion) must finally end in the crack-up boom and the complete breakdown of the currency system.”
http://www.investmentrarities.com/pro-gold.html
Of course, in Mises’s time, there were no pie-in-the-sky SIVs and CDOs, so, of course, we’re “freakin’ doomed,” as the Mogambo (often) sez, and so sez the Pook, who is busy planting more runner beans.
Fair enough Pook, but whenever the media seeks out the opinions of economists, I doubt Lew Rockwell is on many reporters’ speed dial.
You’re quite right, tm, about mainstream economists.
There is such a thing as the real thing in economics, just as there is such a thing as real food that nourishes, real medicine that heals, and we forget this because all areas of our lives are now taken over by criminals and poisoned with lies.
I’m no deep student of von Mises, but he seems like the real thing. Nor do I believe that economics is some kind of complex and unknowable thing–as some modern pundits like to say. It’s math, for fuck’s sake.
My favorite economist is Henry George. Read George along with Nock, and you get clarity about all the fundamental issues. Von Mises is more for people who like details.