Both First-Time and Continuing Claims for Unemployment Benefits Rise
Adding to concerns about weak demand for labor, continuing claims for unemployment benefits rose by 15,000, the second consecutive increase. However, the four-week moving average of continuing claims for unemployment benefits actually fell, an odd mathematical result that cannot continue to occur for more than a few weeks. The sustained rise in first-time claims coupled with the push upward in continuing claims is of concern to some economists, but the continuing claims rising for two weeks in a row while the moving average of those continuing claims is falling could be an even more important sign of trouble ahead: this moving average has now dropped into the same range where it stood right before the last recession.
At first, it might seem to be a contradiction that continuing claims for unemployment benefits could fall right before a serious downturn in an economy, but the explanation for this is that, as more workers experience sustained difficulty finding employment, a progressively larger number of them don't get counted as unemployed—or even in the workforce, for that matter—because they've been out of a job too long. Thus, for a while, anyway, initial claims for unemployment benefits can rise, and even the total number of long-term claimants can rise, but the overall moving average of long-term claimants can fall because so many of those long-term claimants are dropping into the category of "discouraged workers."Dark Wraith CyberGloss
A four-week moving average uses the average value of the current week's number and the three preceding weeks. Each week, the oldest data value is dropped and replaced with the current value to keep the average moving forward as time moves on.
On Wall Street Wednesday, stocks closed modestly higher after a punishing morning that saw all of the major indices bleed down hard before an afternoon recovery fueled by bargain buying and favorable news about oil prices. The Bush Administration declared yesterday that it wanted to see $25 per barrel oil, and investors became all kinds of excited about the boost such cheap oil would give to the domestic economy. For a while, oil prices actually moved lower, flirting in the range below $50 per barrel, largely because of swelling inventories.
But later action Wednesday and early Thursday showed that the forces that initially pushed oil into sky-high territory are still flexing their muscles, and oil prices are now pushing back up above the $50 per barrel mark. The see-saw prices point to a battle of opposing forces, but the Administration's declared desires are generally considered to be meaningless in what will ultimately be the oil price trend over the coming months. As the Federal Reserve continues to push short-term domestic interest rates upward, the U.S. dollar should strengthen against other currencies, and this will cause the price of dollar-denominated oil to fall. Also, as the U.S. economy weakens, demand for oil will ease as well, and this should help oil prices go down.Dark Wraith CyberGloss
From basic economics, if the supply of oil rises, its price should fall; if the demand for oil weakens, its price should fall. Thus, if petroleum inventories are rising, and demand at the gas pump is dropping, the price of oil should almost certainly go down.
On the other hand, the short- and intermediate-term outlooks for oil prices are still very uncertain because of the continuing possibility of major supply disruptions in the Middle East and because of prospects for international conflicts there and in other parts of the world. Should a crisis erupt because of Iran's nuclear weapons program or because of North Korea's nuclear stockpile, oil prices would turn sharply higher and thereby do considerable damage to the many economies around the world that are already teetering on the brink of recession.
Published 5/12/2005 10:00:00 AM
<< 27 Comments Total
First time claims up...
The state where I reside and work is having lots of job cuts. (I'm saying the state is Mississippi to CMA).
35 let go during the days of Fri and Mon. Before that, all the part-timers were told they were no longer needed. Who knows how far it will go. The dude(gov) wants to save some money through taking away the Medicaid and getting rid of employees. He's going to contract out some of the work. They say he doesn't care whether he's elected again as gov as he has his sights on the senate.
The Bush Administration declared yesterday that it wanted to see $25 per barrel oil, and investors became all kinds of excited about the boost such cheap oil would give to the domestic economy.
Ha ha ha ha ha - that line is hilarious. They may say this, but I'm sure they really want it to stay high so their pockets stay full.
How do they expect to get oil to $25 a barrel when they give Halliburton no bid contracts and millions in bonuses? Is that anyway to occupy a country and control the oil? Sheesh.
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Fush is a Bucking Liar
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith,
I found this in the New York Times:
~~~~~~~~~
Even the recent modest surge in jobs has essentially bypassed young American workers. Gains among recently arrived immigrants seem to have accounted for the entire net increase in jobs from 2000 through 2004.
From "The Young and the Jobless"
By BOB HERBERT
~~~~~~~~~
Bush also doesn't sem to care how many young people cannot find a job.
Actually, they are experiencing a deferred LIFE, because without a good job, they can't afford to get an apt., date, get married, or have kids.
If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might tend to think that this was happening in order to force the young people into the military.
I see why you'd be so inclined, but given his history of obliviously running businesses into the ground I'm not sure you really need to credit him with that much forethought.
- oddjob
I like SB Gypsy's thought about the jobs vs youngsters that would be eligibile to sign on
with the military. That is a good way of getting recruits. If they can't get jobs, what will they
do?
It's a good time to think about birth control, if you ask me:) Hmm.. what about those fundies
totally against all sorts of birth control. Could it be that they want to help
the govt fill their militaries? I know Catholics were already against BC, but that could
certainly explain why their SO against it.
Ah well, like SB Gypsy, I won't be a conspiracy theorist ... today.
That seems to be the way it is around where I live, which is predominately a blue collar mill town supporting the wood products industry. The sort of community that doesn't create a lot of incentive for the young to leave home if you follow me.
Last fall, my kid's high school class did a survey on their interest in the military. Something like 50% of the kids indicated an interest in the military after graduation.
What's weird is these were kids in an Advanced Placement class, and it's a blue voting county.
--------
Fush is a Bucking Liar
It's all part-in-parcel with the NeoCon plan of making the United States producers of nothing except high level military technology and importers of everthing.
As oldwhite lady and SB Gypsy pointed out, there will no alternative for the youngsters except the military and the is precisely what the NeoCons want.
They want the United States to be the Global Police. We will have the most technologically advanced and well equiped army capable of deployment to the ends of the earth in a mommments notice (in the NeoCons' dreams)
They seem to have this idea that small specialized strike forces can rule the world.....Iraq is a major set back for them.
The future is bright for those at the top and bleak for those on the bottom.
While many have been predicting the next "great depression" and it has so far failed to materialize....
I will make this bold prediction:
In 2013 just after Jeb Bush's re-election to a second term our economy will collapse. We will approach 35% unemployment with an average tax rate of 53%. Nearly 1/3 of all people under the age of 30 will be working for the military in some fashion.
The dollar will be worth $0.10 per 1 Euro.
You heard it here first.....
Neoconcrusher,
"In 2013 just after Jeb Bush's re-election..."
This presupposes the world survives beyond 2012 which is the year when the ancient Mayan calendar stops.
Ah shucks Peter...Ya Caught me...I was trying to slip one by...I should no better
When high unemployment truly kicks in there are few options; crime, the military, and even sometimes, revolution.
As the military offers 3 hots, a cot, and a squat it can eventually seem to be the best of those narrowing options.
I would think that the neocons factored this into their plans for a Global Murkan Police Force.
In light of BushCo's desire for $25 a barrel oil, I would like to say that I want to be a zillionaire. Let's see which desire comes to pass first.
If they can manage to get even thirty three percent of the population indoctrinated into the military, one out of three people can be expected to keep an eye on the other two when s/he gets done with service. Of course they needn't all go into the military. There are a number of law enforcement agencies that can also be swelled. Then most of us can pay the them, through our fifty some percent income tax, to spy on us.
The other "advantage" of high unemployment/underemployment is that it falls in line for a growing push to eliminate "New Deal" legilation. At a business lunch with one of the builders my company does work for the jack-ass I was lunching with was expressing his hope that Dubbya could help eliminate OSHA regulations. When I asked if he really wanted to see our workforce placed in danger he said, honest to gods, "Have you seen unemployment rates lately? If workers are killed or seriously injured thats another open job." Mind you, I currently (but not much longer)live in MI where good old John Engler pushed tort reform capping liability lawsuits against employers, no matter the extent of injury to $250,000. That is even if the worker is killed. I fear my reply to that comment may result in a loss of further contracts with that builder. Of course my boss and his wife decided that we won't work for him again anyhow.
Also telling is the cuts in education. Suspicious that the easiest way for low income individuals to get a education is to join the military.
Good evening, good people. I've been a bit out of the picture today, and I must apologize: I am at the end of yet another semester, and that means finals week. Write the finals, administer the finals, grade the finals, issue the final grades, pass out from exhaustion.
In that order, I should hope.
Anyway, I got my second wind, so I dealt with a question posed to me by Mr. Shakes on the thread down below. I'm not all that certain you'll want to read it if you're at all given to drowsiness, but it's there for all to read.
I fear sometimes that, when I write about economics, the government is going to get its hands on my articles and start reading them to the interred prisoners at some off-shore torturing facility.
That would be so... so... wrong to do that to human beings.
The Dark Wraith recoils at the thought.
Good evening, Autie Roo.
The prospect of rising unemployment being used as a way of filling the ranks of the soldier class of a society has been tried with greater or lesser degrees of success throughout history.
One interesting sidelight is that, not only does enlistment provide the unemployed young people with jobs, it also provides a means by which those same young people step outside of the repression that is being visited upon the civilians of the society. Even though military life is harsh and repressive in its own right, there is a power, an authority, and a waiver that comes with uniformed life that sets the soldier, the policeman, the federal agent, and other people of that sort apart from and above everyone else.
It is, in a very real sense, a license to be part of the oppressing class, if only as a pawn. For the disaffected, the disenfranchised, the otherwise hopeless, that is a much better life than awaits the person without a gun, a uniform, and a license to kill.
The Dark Wraith just wishes there were another way that this society could give young people a sense of self-esteem.
As a sometime student of the evolution of language, I thank Auntie Roo for the update in terminology: "As the military offers 3 hots, a cot, and a squat...". 30 years or so ago, I heard it referred to as "3 squares and a rack".
Good morning Dark Wraith -RE: Finals - Sounds like Hell week to me.
Do remember to take time out to relax.
It's certainly good of you to get over here to answer us, too:)
Good afternoon, Old White Lady.
Education technology has left me behind. The "canned exam" is used by most teachers these days: publishers are just all too happy to provide everything from PowerPoint lectures to exams. All I need to do is point and click, and everything gets handled for me. My students can even take their exams online, and their answers will be automatically assessed, their scores will be instantly recorded, and their grades will be immediately tallied. I can just sit back and REEEElax.
Like Hell I'm going to do it that way.
The Dark Wraith takes pride in his home-cooked meals.
[And dinner for his hapless students is about to be served.]
(And that should get the attention of the handful of his current and former students who have managed to find this blog and troll here silently all the time.)
Poor students. I feel for them. I have just escaped my own hell week, somewhat unscathed. Now the moving process to a new location...an internship, for the whole summer.
Consequently, no internet for a whole week. Something about the DSL adjustments taking 7 days, and me unfortunately being too spoiled to use dial-up. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I guess I'll just have to take it one day at a time.
Everyone have a great week.
lowlyredstater
Also won't be here next week. Out of town.
- oddjob
Dark Wraith,
What? You refuse to be a McTeacher? My gods man,challenging students, making more work for yourself, are you trying to say colleges allow that sort of thing anymore?
Peter - I'm afraid that I was being snarky with my terminology. The phrase I used is prison slang but I thought it was appropriate while referring to the neo con military.
As to how I know prison slang... Three of my five brothers have had the dubious distinction of doing time.
One interesting sidelight is that, not only does enlistment provide the unemployed young people with jobs, it also provides a means by which those same young people step outside of the repression that is being visited upon the civilians of the society.
For some reason this brought to my mind the use of Jews by the Nazis to police the ghettos. But alas, even though they served their masters well, they too were sent to the camps.
Good Evening Professor DW...
As one of your trolling students, I must say that I'm very glad you put some thought into your exams even though they do give me a run for my money. For too long I have heard about the bar being lowered in the educational system - perhaps great revolution can happen one classroom at a time....
Dark Wraith - Good for you. It may be more work, but in the end, you're giving the student quality learning. Most of my teachers were like that, but some weren't. You could tell which were which. Ultimately, the teachers who want their students to get something out of the class, busted their butts to draw out the student's unmotivated brain. Ah, that brings back memories.
The sound of a lonesome wind blows thru the blog, a tumbleweed sized dust-bunny rolls by (My God, are those SPAM labels stuck to it???) and Clover wonders where all the bloggers have gone...perhaps having a life for the weekend.
But I just wanted to observe that the Roanoke Times Sunday op-ed pages were about 75% explaining things like the massive growth in CEO compensation-with comparisons such as so$so's salary is enough to provide health insurance to 35000 people(the CEO was of an insurance company). Real life comparasons that may mean more to Joe 6-pack than simple numbers.Other things spoken of were the truly regressive nature of the tax cuts-once again with, gasp, numbers, ethics discussions about Delay being rather silly when conducted by folks whose ethical conduct includes tax cuts for the wealthy, lack of funding for schools and health and nutrition for all these childs that must not be left behind. And more. A call to the media to start advocating a period of nation service, either military or something a la Peace Corp for all 18 year olds(gee, I've said that one since the 70's). All in all, I expect massive denunciations by conservatives of the "liberal bias" in the LTTE section in days to come. Oh, and one writer was saying we need to start hollering about the Bushonomics and the media needs to help. My thought was-where were you 3 or 4 years ago, bozo?
Either the Times has decided to throw caution to the wind and actually be a liberal rag since whatever thay do they get accused of it anyway, or things have gotten so bad that they can't hide from it anymore.
Oh, Mr. Wraith, it may be on my end, but the loading was really wonky when I came to the blog-first I had to reload because it didn't finish, then it loaded, but the news ticker ended up in the middle of this comments thread somehow. It may very well be my 'puter being strange, but if not, I figured You'd like to know.
DW,
Re Wild Clover's comments on the Times, your comment some time ago (concerning the "revelation of one of the great mysteries of our time") in response to Oddjob's question about same, a question posed on the Rigorous Intuition Discussion Board--"Is something going on"?, and this http://tinyurl.com/9es6f revelation from ABC News concerning involuntary sterilization of thousands of people in the 20th century, Is Something Going On? Such as: Are we being set up for some sort of "confession" or "revelation" by the govt?
Good evening, Peter of Lone Tree.
Something is always going on. To the extent that some of what goes on rightly qualifies as "conspiracy theory," it is not worth mentioning until one day long in the future, after all of the players are well cold in their graves.
Awful things are the province of governments, both those supposedly open, as well as those that everyone recognizes as shrouded in secrets.
And of secrets, many are secrets only because people don't want to know them. Many would rather keep an open lie even when the truth is fully available. I am reminded in this regard of an incident a few years ago when an old fellow in my acquaintance was talking about his younger years when he lived in the vicinity of the Attica State Prison at the time of the Attica Riot. A number of prison guards were held hostage, several of them friends of this acquaintance of mine.
The end of the riot came in a hail of pistol and shotgun fire from state troopers, county deputies, and other law enforcement officers. When the smoke had cleared, a number of the prisoners and their hostages were dead. The guards had had their throats slit. It was only after a state coroner's inquiry—complete with exhaustive autopsies of the dead—that it was conclusively determined (by, among other methods, the relative levels of free histamines in the wounds) that the hostages' throats not only were slit post-mortem, but were slit a notable time after they were killed by rounds from the law enforcement officers' weapons.
In other words, Peter, upon securing the bodies of the dead, someone went around and slit the dead guards' throats to make it look like the hostage-taking inmates deserved every bit of any cruelty the justice system could mete for their seige.
My acquaintance would talk years later and at length about the monstrous inmates who had "slit the throats of good men."
No amount of truth can turn the heart that lives through the lies that animate beliefs.
In our time, Peter, a man named Negroponte has again assumed a position of official power in a foreign land on behalf of this nation. Mr. Negroponte is a documented supporter, in his last official capacity as a representative of this nation, of a genocide in Central America. The United Nations conducted an official and exhaustive investigation that recorded 30,000 corpses—most of them of peasants—butchered by the thugs of Right-wing dictatorship on Mr. Negroponte's watch, with the United States checkbook open through him to make this happen at that scale and for that duration.
Every war, declared or otherwise, has its atrocities. Most are known, at least to some; and the books are available by which everyone could know about them.
That we choose not to see the monsters in our own lands, in our own selves, is not a testament to the baseness of our hearts so much as it is a symbol of how, in our desperation to be in the Grace of the Lord, we will lie to both ourselves and to God, hoping that neither has seen the truth. Perhaps their hope will be fulfilled.
But I choose to think not. And that, Peter of Lone Tree, is the lie I choose to believe.
The Dark Wraith has spoken.
Good evening, Wild Clover.
First, concerning strange loading of the Website, I have noticed that happening once in a great while. It's a server/client glitch that is (usually) rectified when the page is reloaded. It should be a really rare occurrence, but I've seen it on maybe three occasions over the past couple of months, and that bothers me a little. Computers have hiccups from time to time, but the server is supposed to be able to determine if this has happened during a client page load.
It's just one more reason why this age of computerized certainty is no less sure in its procedures than any other age.
Do you have a date on that article you were describing? I'd really like to get my hands on it. If there's an online link, I'd even note it in an Open Forum post. If you have time to find out, I'd be most grateful. If you contact them, you may, as you choose, describe yourself as being either in voluntary or in conscripted service to the Dark Wraith. If you call or e-mail them, please feel free to say that you are in designated capacity for The Dark Wraith Forums.
By the way, and as a side note, what weirds me out is that, several months ago, I would have followed that last sentence with a sarcastic line like, "Boy, that'll impress 'em!" Now, however, considering that so many of the hits on this Web page are coming from network servers—which means the majority of the visitors are at work and possibly not just Web surfing—I'm not so certain anymore that I should be quite so sardonic about such things.
Aw, what the heck.
Boy, that'll impress 'em.
But I am serious: if you need to contact the Roanoke Times by e-mail or whatever to find out about an online link, please note that this is for the Dark Wraith. I think I have to agree with your assessment that it appears that the editors have decided to throw caution to the wind and start telling the truth. It's a balancing act for a newspaper: on the one hand, the editors don't want to offend those who support the Republicans' neo-conservative agenda; but on the other hand, if the newspaper's articles get too far from the realities their readers are experiencing, they begin to lose subscribers, especially if there are other media outlets available that tell it like it is.
I honestly don't think the Blogosphere has yet posed such a competitive threat to newspapers, but I do think that editors are becoming more and more aware that a threat is looming down the road.
Why do I think this? That's easy: a small but noticeable percentage of the hits to this minor blog upon which we are gathered come from servers associated in one way or another with what could be described as media outlets. That's pretty neat.
Of course, an even more noticeable number of the hits to this blog come from servers of agencies of the federal government.
The Dark Wraith is torn about whether that last statistic is neat or creepy.