I remember Elaine Chao coming out with her fingerpainted smile, every time they released the employment report. Sometimes CNBC would let the curmudgeonly guy grill her a little about the revisions, nnd the jobs going to China, and the Birth Death Model, but then the pretty girl who was his sidekick would trump him with her inimitable combination of charm and cleavage.

Maybe people quit their jobs to flip stocks. Now the markets cooled off a bit, hey that's okay, we needed the pullback, and its good for the job market. Can't argue with that.

So the REAL unemployment rate, U6, stands at over 16%. That's one in every six adults unemployed! When does the revolution begin? One in five? one in four? Stay tuned.

We could use another recalibration of the economy in favor of the working classes and I'm getting too old for a revolution. But what I really think is gonna happen is we're gonna have a 10 year recession like Japan did in the 90s. After that, maybe we'll all have changed our spending habits permenantly and the world can find someone else to sell their cheap consumer trash to.

All this news means is that we're still in a downward part of the curve and the knee point has, maybe, moved a little closer. We're still not growing enough of our own food or making enough of our own stuff.

... a plausible explanation of where the jobs are going to come from in the hoped-for recovery.

I know from personal experience that many of the lost jobs have been sent overseas and are unlikely to return in the foreseeable future (if ever). Service sector jobs won't come back until people have money to spend on services. Construction jobs won't come back until people/companies start buying buildings and work through the backlog of unsold properties.

Can anyone make a believable guess about which sector of our economy will start hiring again and what circumstances will lead to this?

How about A) the Gaming and Resort industry? In the old Las Vegas there were many perks, affordable or even free hotel rooms, free buffets. The old Las Vegas did okay during recessions. Viva the old Las Vegas.

B)Healthcare, DDS. My dentist gets a grand and a half for a crown. Baby boomers with bad teeth.

C)Gold mining. This is my pick for the century. The high costs of energy, equipment and labor have hurt the juniors, which is where most of the new gold comes from. With the final deflationary washout, and the destruction of confidence in fiat currency, nations will nationalize their gold, and back their currency. The gold mining industry will soar due to lower costs and strong demand. Or think of the guys who sell the picks and shovels to the miners.

Why gold? (see B)

Can anyone explain why the monthly job losses have fallen by one third from April to May when there has been no corresponding drop in the weekly unemployment claims?

You and I keep echoing the same theme on these threads. Absent a significant shift in the US economy the jobs are gone and will not be coming back. The few jobs that will be added over the next few years will be for less money. Overall wages will continue to decline for the most workers.

And who cares what the hell the bloody stock market does? The stock market did great from 2002-08 but WAGES fell, employment sucked, cost increses in healthcare sucked up whatever raises did happen and 90% of the public fell further and further behind. The stock market is a measure of corporate profits and the wealth of the investment class. It has little to nothing to do with health of the middle class which continues to get worse.

9.4% unemployment is really high. I don't really get the sense that media coverage reflects this reality, and most reports on economic news always seem to find the silver lining. The "good news" that job losses were not as high as expected doesn't change the fact that job losses at that level mean continued rising unemployment. A lot of people are out of work and that isn't going to improve any time soon.

(Link: http://www.eschatonblog.com/2009/06/unemployment.html)

I'd say that sounds right. The media coverage doesn't reflect reality. It mostly seems obsessed with the stock market which strikes me as out of touch with the reality of a 16.4 percent U6 number. 16.4 percent is roughly one out of six workers who are either out of work, forced to work part time when they want to work full time or who are so discouraged that they have essentially stopped looking at some point in the past year. With the ripple effects that we are about to see from the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, I expect that number may yet climb.

Anyway, glad that the number wasn't any worse. But no matter how you slice it, a net decline (wait for the upward revision) of ~350k isn't really good news.

Bloomberg has an article up (http://bit.ly/jWmOs) that's pretty interesting. The Eschaton take on it is "If we pretend everything's ok then it is."

Anyway, the headline at Bloomberg is "Bank Profits From Accounting Rules Masking Looming Loan Losses"

Analysts who have examined the quarterly profits and government tests say that accounting rule changes and rosy assumptions are making the institutions look healthier than they are.

-snip-

Citigroup’s $1.6 billion in first-quarter profit would vanish if accounting were more stringent, says Martin Weiss of Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Florida. “The big banks’ profits were totally bogus,” says Weiss, whose 38-year-old firm rates financial companies. “The new accounting rules, the stress tests: They’re all part of a major effort to put lipstick on a pig.”

Further deterioration of loans will eventually force banks to recognize losses that their bookkeeping lets them ignore for now, says David Sherman, an accounting professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

Zombie banks are putting the screws to even well-qualified borrowers. Credit is contracting. We have our Minsky moment at hand. In an economy that is so dependent on consumption for growth, what does this mean for labor? I don't think this ride is over quite yet.