Surveys are meaningless..
Consumer spendings have been coming up even tho real incomes shrink..
They may be successful at re-inflating the bubble at least on a short term

Mike,where did you get such statistics? Base on the recent report releasedyesterday, all major retailers ended in the negative numbers in the lastquater. And the unemployment did not decrease.

To Epshtein: if standard deviation is less than+/- 5 you can not make any inferences with that data. So, 0.1% does not tell usanything for the period of time.

The false economic improvement (temporary) is coming. Ant it will be helped with our Brezhnev style media...


Until of the new tax provision with take place and new business tax season comes... then brace for impact... since there is not too many people left to "shave", the businesses will have to closing.

I just rean on one of the blogs - the real unemployment is around 17% and rising...


Cheers...(D)(D)(D)

Galina, the data i get directly from Bloomberg datafeed
Last month Personal Spendings were up .4%

now, about the "real" unemployment..
it's all about the definition.. i can't tell which one is the "right" definition.. you can say it's 17%, or 38.2% or 9.2%.. it's largely irrelevant.. as long as you always computer the trend based on the same definition.. that's the only important condition.

To Лютак, question... How did you manage to calculate std? Are you trying to say that we cannot make any long term conclusions based on one month results? Who would argue with that?
The only thing it does say (assuming the calculations in July were made the same way they were made in June) that unemployment rate didn't go up whether you like Obama or not.

The margin of error for this data is actually very hard to compute, due to the sampling methodology they are using.
Historically an average revision of data has been about .2%.

Before passing the stimulus bill, they argued that IF the bill didn't pass the umemployment would go up above 9% in April...now we are in August and it's away above 9%...the stimulus obviously didn't work...now>>why are they asking about the second stimulus if they have not even spent all the money yet??

I think the real reason, Sveta, is that they want to try to get the money well before midterm elections next year. Which may shift the power in congress. People don't forgive things like that "give my money to the poor slab, who has a shitty car, so he can drive a brand new one" gimmick. You'll see.

***********.youtube.com/watch?v=zhhkF3dqXR0
this is really cool.....:-D

BOB&TOM TV: "Obama Man" by Greg Morton