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US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

cnbc.com

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Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#111

Post by _curious_ »

save_ferris wrote: post #105
_curious_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's so much optimism around a quick recovery, but we've also gotten really bad at using poor KPIs (like the stock market) to judge economic performance." = fully agreed, and further wondering: what KPIs would you use?

I believe the way we collect data around the economy needs to be completely rethought. It's clear that the gig economy model is the future for many workers, but it's proliferated in a way that absolves companies of financial responsibility and has created massive inequality that our current system isn't able to effectively address. We have to rethink the way we define and calculate employment, underemployment, and un…

I recall a time many moons ago when I was doing some research on the way in which my state determined their own employment/economic statistics.

It was quite an eye opening experience and exploration. State level economists/demographers are using totally obsolete methods, worse was they they didn't want to disclose certain key elements short of a DPA (state equivalent to FOI) which further led to believe that their archaic approach may be intentionally misleading because "look at how great our unemployment rate is" ;)

I can't speak to fed stuff, never dug in to deep. Totally agree with what you are saying and wondering what (trusted) existing KPIs out there would make sense to look at as say a subcategory of unemployment, if it gets any more granular?

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#112

Post by _curious_ »

save_ferris wrote: post #105
_curious_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's so much optimism around a quick recovery, but we've also gotten really bad at using poor KPIs (like the stock market) to judge economic performance." = fully agreed, and further wondering: what KPIs would you use?

I believe the way we collect data around the economy needs to be completely rethought. It's clear that the gig economy model is the future for many workers, but it's proliferated in a way that absolves companies of financial responsibility and has created massive inequality that our current system isn't able to effectively address. We have to rethink the way we define and calculate employment, underemployment, and un…

Here's what looks like some new weekly research made public re. res rental payment: https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/nmhc-rent-payment-trac...

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#113

Post by Izkata »

strict9 wrote: post #24
shartshooter wrote: post #10

we’ve now lost 10% of workforce in three weeks I’m a little surprised it’s not higher. I assumed with bars, gyms, retail, house cleaners (and not to mention wait staff at restaurants) all out of a job indefinitely that those folks made up >10% of the workforce.

It is definitely much higher. Many states' unemployment systems are woefully inadequate. Florida (but probably other states too) intentionally made the unemployment claims system painful/impossible to navigate: > “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.” https://www.p…

From what I'm seeing on Reddit, the system in Chicago is also simply overloaded - they can't process claims fast enough to handle the spike, so people have to keep trying.

~6.6m might just be as fast as we can process per week.

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#114

Post by save_ferris »

_curious_ wrote: post #111
save_ferris wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the way we collect data around the economy needs to be completely rethought. It's clear that the gig economy model is the future for many workers, but it's proliferated in a way that absolves companies of financial responsibility and has created massive inequality that our current system isn't able to effectively address. We have to rethink the way we define and calculate employment, underemployment, and un…

I recall a time many moons ago when I was doing some research on the way in which my state determined their own employment/economic statistics. It was quite an eye opening experience and exploration. State level economists/demographers are using totally obsolete methods, worse was they they didn't want to disclose certain key elements short of a DPA (state equivalent to FOI) which further led to believe that their ar…

Ultimately, the most hopeful future I see is one where all levels of government, from municipalities all the way up to the federal government report out raw data as close to real-time as possible so that academic institutions, non-profits, etc., can do data science for the public, so to speak.

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#115

Post by DuskStar »

ceejayoz wrote: post #91
sjg007 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Floridians should vote in their best interest then..

Floridians are trying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Florida_Amendment_4 The legislature and Governor took a look at the 65% vote and went "nah", though, and put a bunch of new obstacles in place to override the voters.

Not like Florida Republicans are the only offenders there. 59% voted in favor of California's "let's check if people are illegal immigrants" amendment back in 1994 [0], but then the incoming Democratic governor refused to defend it in court. (Sure, it may have actually been unconstitutional, but considering it's basically the opposite of 'sanctuary cities'...)

Denying the public the benefit of politically inconvenient propositions is a long tradition in the US.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_18...

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#116

Post by sjg007 »

chasd00 wrote: post #64
sjg007 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Markets are driven more by expectations 6+ months from now If this was the case then we wouldn't have since the crash due to Covid-19.

during the market crashes we weren't we looking at 100-240k dead in the coming months and that was considered "good"?

My point is that people claim that the market has already priced in the next 6 months. This is not true.

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#117

Post by chasd00 »

notyourday wrote: post #103
chasd00 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't the loan forgiven if it's spent on payroll during the shelter-in-place orders?

Only the part that went into the payroll. So a business owner with no revenue borrowed money he did not need and got saddled with the payments. Oh, and as the vast majority of the loans it is personally guaranteed. Compare this with: Don't get the loan. Shut it down. Not owe more money than the owner would owe already.

"Only the part that went into the payroll"

why else would you ask for the loan? the whole point is to keep employees on the payroll while they're under shelter-in-place orders.

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#118

Post by ptero »

sjg007 wrote: post #116
chasd00 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

during the market crashes we weren't we looking at 100-240k dead in the coming months and that was considered "good"?

My point is that people claim that the market has already priced in the next 6 months. This is not true.

Next 6 months includes a lot of uncertainty in expectations which is, statistically, priced in. Those expectations may have a distribution which might make for a strange average response.

For example, consider a bimodal distribution: 50% +1, 50% -1. The average is zero, but everyone that believes in this distribution believes that zero is highly unlikely. Thus, if there are big benefit for guessing right and little for guessing zero, the actions can rapidly oscillate, seemingly without major external information (just based on whichever of two almost-equally-likely outcomes seems likelier).

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#119

Post by ceejayoz »

DuskStar wrote: post #115
ceejayoz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Floridians are trying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Florida_Amendment_4 The legislature and Governor took a look at the 65% vote and went "nah", though, and put a bunch of new obstacles in place to override the voters.

Not like Florida Republicans are the only offenders there. 59% voted in favor of California's "let's check if people are illegal immigrants" amendment back in 1994 [0], but then the incoming Democratic governor refused to defend it in court. (Sure, it may have actually been unconstitutional, but considering it's basically the opposite of 'sanctuary cities'...) Denying the public the benefit of politically inconvenien…

> California's "let's check if people are illegal immigrants" amendment

That's a really disingenuous description of an amendment intended to "prohibit undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services".

> Sure, it may have actually been unconstitutional...

It's funny that this is waved away as a minor issue, as if it weren't a giant difference between the two situations you're trying to draw a comparison between.

Re: US weekly jobless claims jump by 6.6M

#120

Post by daxfohl »

twomoretime wrote: post #16
brenden2 wrote: post #9

The Fed conveniently released an announcement about a new $2.3t free money program at the same time. The Fed's actions only serve to confirm what I think a lot of people already know: things are going to get really bad. It's a bit strange watching the stock market continue to pump knowing many of these companies have had their revenues drop by as much as 100%.

On the other hand, hasn't a lot of cash outflow been reduced right now too? I feel like we're putting the economy on pause. If we can survive in this state for another 3 or so months, there's a good chance things will quickly return to normal - or at least most companies will survive and start rehiring under a new normal.

I don't think three months is right though. We need to wait at bare minimum until contagion goes back down to the level it was when we shut the economy down. Even if we say that's three months off, we'll just have to shut it back down again shortly after. Then cases will go way back up the way they currently are and we'll wait another few months until they go back down. A number of cycles of this until we hit herd immunity, which, if we say 1% of population catch it each cycle, that's quite a number of multi-month cycles.
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