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Friday, September 06, 2013

Shake And Bake!

President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) are going to square off on the budget again.

While overseas, the president is handed more news that makes him feel like going to need a pack of smokes.

The unemployment numbers, once again, modest job growth and a lower number. Good enough for the president. Bad enough for the agitators to whine about the "weak" job market.

The Department of Labor reports that 169,000 jobs were added for the month of August. The job market seems to be cooling off because this is still not enough jobs according to the agitators of the junk food media.

The unemployment rate did, however, drop to 7.3%, but that's basically just due to continued exodus from the workforce.

The participation rate fell to 63.2% from 63.4%.

This Do NOTHING Congress has spent a portion of the session repealing Obamacare. They've spent a portion of their time trying to push the button on destroying the economy. There's another budget battle looming and Republicans are going to push this cut everything theme.

The drop in unemployment was due largely to people giving up looking for work, which takes them out of the official labor force, so they're no longer counted as unemployed.

BLS revised June and July payroll numbers significantly lower, erasing 74,000 jobs from the books. Based on the new data, the economy has added just 148,000 jobs per month in the past three months, down from a pace of 207,000 jobs per month in the first three months of the year. At the current rate, job growth is just barely enough to keep up with population growth and keep unemployment from rising.

President Barack Obama can't get nothing done with the constant irritation from the leaders of Congress. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Nancy Pelosi (D-California) constantly piss the president off with their ongoing bickering and delaying of his policies.
The economy has added 6.8 million jobs since the labor market bottomed in February 2010. But it is still about 1.9 million jobs shy of its peak in January 2008, in what has been the slowest job-market recovery since World War II.

Friday's report comes just days ahead of a Federal Reserve policy meeting, at which Ben Bernanke & Co. have announced that they plan to start "tapering" an unusual stimulus program. The Fed has been buying $85 billion per month in bonds for the past several months to help keep interest rates low and boost the economy. But in May, Bernanke and other Fed officials started warning the market they intended to slow down the pace of their bond buying.

Financial markets, particularly the bond market, have been shaken by the Fed's plan. The interest rate on the 10-year Treasury note, a benchmark for borrowing throughout the economy, has nearly doubled, to 3 percent on Thursday from 1.6 percent in the spring. That has driven mortgage rates higher and cooled a housing market that had been one of the bright spots of the economy.

The relatively weak August jobs report might inspire the Fed to be a little more cautious about tightening policy, so financial markets had a seemingly perverse reaction to downbeat economic data: Stock and bond prices both rose on Friday morning, in hopes the Fed would have mercy.

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