interestrateripoff Posted February 4, 2011 Share Posted February 4, 2011 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/us-recovery-could-take-years-warns-bernanke-2203790.html Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, said he would not consider the US economic recovery to be fully established until unemployment began to fall sharply, and that could still take several years.In remarks which signalled the central bank will maintain its accommodative monetary policy for the foreseeable future, Mr Bernanke acknowledged recent encouraging signs from the labour market but said employers remained reluctant to hire. His comments came the day before the Labour Department was due to release employment data for January. Economists are expecting today's figures to show 150,000 new jobs were created last month, but that the US unemployment rate ticked up from 9.4 per cent in December to 9.5 per cent, as people returned to the workforce. "Until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established," Mr Bernanke said in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington. "Although economic growth will probably increase this year, we expect the unemployment rate to remain stubbornly above, and inflation to remain stubbornly below, the levels that Federal Reserve policymakers have judged to be consistent over the longer term with our mandate." The Fed is midway through a $600bn programme of quantitative easing, buying US Government bonds in an attempt to hold down interest rates and stimulate activity in the world's largest economy. Official US interest rates have been held at zero since December 2008, forcing the central bank to adopt additional unconventional measures to affect market rates. I'm getting the impression Bernanke is starting to feel panicked in all of this, I'd guess in Fed speak he's admitting there is no recovery and he's run out of ideas. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azogar Posted February 4, 2011 Share Posted February 4, 2011 Ben has told you what he is going to do Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
interestrateripoff Posted February 4, 2011 Author Share Posted February 4, 2011 http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/02/04/uk-usa-economy-idUKTRE7132UT20110204 U.S. employment rose by a meagre 36,000 jobs in January, far less than expected, as severe snow storms slammed large parts of the nation, but the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since April 2009.Despite the conflicting signals in the Labour Department's report on Friday, economists agreed a recovery in the Labour market was proceeding apace if not gaining speed. Many investors also saw the data as a sign of strength. Government bonds sold off and the dollar rallied against the yen and the euro. The payrolls gain reported by U.S. employers was a quarter of the 145,000 gain economists had expected. But a separate household survey, which is used to determine the jobless rate, showed nearly 600,000 more people reported they were employed. That surge in employment pushed the unemployment rate to 9 percent from 9.4 percent in December. The rate has dropped 0.8 percentage point since November, the biggest two-month decline since 1958. "Looking at the two surveys together, they suggest that employment is going to pick up. Clearly it has lagged the other measures of activity, but we're in a jobs market recovery now," said Zach Pandl, U.S. economist at Nomura Securities International in New York. So hardly any jobs created yet unemployment falls? Self employment on the up? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Take Me Back To London! Posted February 4, 2011 Share Posted February 4, 2011 (edited) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/us-recovery-could-take-years-warns-bernanke-2203790.html I'm getting the impression Bernanke is starting to feel panicked in all of this, I'd guess in Fed speak he's admitting there is no recovery and he's run out of ideas. Dear interestrateripoff, I think you will find this video interesting. John Stewart's exposure of Bernanke's lies, that he is not printing money, on the the recent 60 minutes interview and the 60 minutes BB interview from 2 years ago. http://dailybail.com/home/watch-jon-stewart-expose-bernankes-lies-from-60-minutes-the.html Edited February 4, 2011 by Take Me Back To London! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
interestrateripoff Posted February 4, 2011 Author Share Posted February 4, 2011 http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=179152 Wow.... if you remember on the ADP and Claims numbers, I said I was expecting +100k.That was way off - we really got +36k. The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 9.0 percent in January, while nonfarm payroll employment changed little (+36,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in manufacturing and in retail trade but was down in construction and in transportation and warehousing. Employment in most other major industries changed little over the month. Youch. There's no love in here. Worse, the benchmark revisions are out, and they show about 300,000 supposedly-reported jobs that didn't really happen. No, really? How come that number seems to always be in this direction? That is, why is it that the BLS always seems to over-report reality in the establishment survey? That inconvenient truth, incidentally, is why I always use the household numbers. They're at least a real survey without BS "adjustments" applied and while they're subject to sampling error at least they're not intentionally distorted. This officially sucks. On a month-by-month basis the number of actual employed people dropped by more than 1.5 million! That's a huge decrease and what's worse, the trend is awful, being unbroken now since the first of last year. Remember, we need about +150,000 in actual employment just to keep up with new entrants into the workforce. We instead lost ten times that number of actual employed. The monthly numbers are noisy in this regard, but there's simply no way to argue "strength" in these numbers, irrespective of how much cheerleading you'd like to do. Not-in-labor force numbers are still rising, but the annualized change is now negative. That's a positive. Mildly. Unfortunately it's not turning into actual jobs, it's turning into people looking for work and not finding it. The employment rate posted a new low for the recessionary period - 57.6%, falling below the 57.8% registered in January of 2010. There has been no improvement - at all - in the employment picture, and in fact the employed rate, as a percentage of the non-institutionalized population, is now the worst it has been since the economic downturn began. Recovery my ass. Dennigers take on the strong US employment numbers..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
interestrateripoff Posted February 4, 2011 Author Share Posted February 4, 2011 Dear interestrateripoff, I think you will find this video interesting. John Stewart's exposure of Bernanke's lies, that he is not printing money, on the the recent 60 minutes interview and the 60 minutes BB interview from 2 years ago. http://dailybail.com/home/watch-jon-stewart-expose-bernankes-lies-from-60-minutes-the.html From the 2009 appearance...PELLEY Is that tax money that the Fed is spending? BERNANKE It's not tax money. the banks have-- accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. So it's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing. PELLEY You've been printing money? BERNANKE Well, effectively. And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. when the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation. From the 2010 appearance... BERNANKE: "One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. What we're doing is lowing interest rates by buying Treasury securities. And by lowering interest rates, we hope to stimulate the economy to grow faster. So, the trick is to find the appropriate moment when to begin to unwind this policy. And that's what we're gonna do." Can't view the video unfortunately but the above is very amusing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Take Me Back To London! Posted February 4, 2011 Share Posted February 4, 2011 Can't view the video unfortunately but the above is very amusing. There is this on youtube, but the audio and image are low quality. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5be_apZRK_Y&feature=related Also watch for the bit about the 110 billion dollars worth of defective 100 dollar bills that will take a year to sort out from the print run and then be burnt! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scepticus Posted February 4, 2011 Share Posted February 4, 2011 Need to at least double US QE to date. Then if the surplus countries don't tighten and allow their currencies to appreciate, same again. Then again if required. Then again f required. Otherwise it'll be a 'Times Square' moment of his own Obama or his successor will face. Either that or a world bank bearing SDRs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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