Unemployment Rate matches lowest point in half a century

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PaulinVA

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money.cnn.com

Unemployment rate matches lowest point in half a century

The economy added 223,000 jobs in May, better than expected.
money.cnn.com

So, I am not a Trump supporter. At All. I think he’s a terrible person.

But, what’s going on with the unemployment rate? Has he just not done anything to screw up the trend of the past nine years?

“The economy has been expanding for almost nine years, the second-longest streak on record. And employers have added jobs every month for seven and a half years”
 
You must feel very unhappy about the successful turn of events due to our great President Trump’s 18 months in office. If you correct your analysis of the previous administration you may feel better.
 
7_Sorrows said:
i remember high unemployment when Obama was president.
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Yeah. btw it was caused by Bush and Obama brought it down.
BTW it has been trending down ever since. (Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

Noting new under the sun.
 
I think what a lot of people don’t understand, and perhaps don’t want to understand, is that employer psychology has a lot to do with employment and the economy generally.

I remember well the early Obama years when Obama was talking about all kinds of measures he wanted, many of which never actually happened. I remember the talk among employers and their actions. Businesses make decisions way in advance and work toward them. When they “hunker down” it really has an effect. They don’t buy land to build on. They don’t engage architects to design new facilities. They don’t buy new machines. They don’t hire any more people than they absolutely have to.

That can be dramatic in effect, but isn’t necessarily. In the early 1930s there was what I think of as the “unpainted store phenomenon”. Merchant’s store could use a paint job. He knew exactly how much product he was going to sell that year, and it wasn’t a lot. He figured he could buy enough paint to pain the store. But then he noticed other stores that needed new paint and figured he could get by at least another year without painting his own because nobody would notice anyway.

And it went on and on and on. The paint company cut back on plans for new facilities. The jobbers didn’t hire any new salesmen. The auto companies didn’t manufacture additional cars for additional salesmen. And so on.

The last administration’s era was not 1932, but 1932 has not recurred since 1932. What we did see was a very slow recovery from a sudden bottom. There really was a sudden uptick after Trump’s election and not just on the stock market.

Truthfully, a lot of business people, particularly small business people, were afraid of Obama. He was full of a lot of ideas he never implemented, but some of them were just scary and nobody knew for sure which things he would get done and which things he wouldn’t. Big business probably didn’t worry too much about it because they knew they would write all the regulations anyway. But small businesses just didn’t expand except for “sure things”.

Trump’s election took the lid off a lot of people. I see sudden business expansion all around me. Some of it might be regional, but I sure don’t think all of it is.
 
I don’t think anyone can truthfully say Bush caused the recession. It had already started in Europe before the U.S. hit the wall. Looking at your chart, it’s clear unemployment was high elsewhere and has gone down since 2010 elsewhere as well. Bush didn’t determine German employment, but European financial woes certainly preceded ours.
 
I should have added this:

I can’t say that anything Trump has done has improved the stock market or employment. I doubt it did. But psychologically with business people, I think there was a broad-based positive effect from his election.
 
grotto said:
You must feel very unhappy about the successful turn of events due to our great President Trump’s 18 months in office. If you correct your analysis of the previous administration you may feel better.
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What a mean-spirited post. Is this in line with your profile quote, “Praying to be pleasing to God when He calls me Home”?
 
Gee, I hope I wasn’t that bad. Sorry if you are more unhappy.

I felt the need to respond to your mistaken judgment of jobs and the economy because everybody I know feels good about the way things are beginning to move. Tax cut, money in the pockets, more jobs coming, securing our country’s broken borders, waging war on violent killers that are in the USA illegally by entering broken borders and previous Administrations policies of Border Patrol stand-down, etc. Our military has been saved from the precipice of disasterous shortages in personnel, material, morale and salary. The end of Obama Care that ripped everybody off and cost taxpayers billions. I can keep praising things - reminds me of President Trump joking with Americans that he would work so hard to keep us winning that we would say “Please Mr. President, slow down on winning, its sooo much - we are not used to it!” (not an exact quote) Anyway, I hope you won’t mind my enthusiasm in defending our President and all we hope to accomplish to
Make America Great Again! He isn’t really a terrible person - he is a person that God loves as well as his lovely wife and children. He is not alone in asking forgiveness.
 
Yeh, I hate to see it if interest rates ever came back to their historical levels so savers can again share the glee.
 
grotto said:
He is not alone in asking forgiveness.
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He is on the record as saying he has never done anything that he would have to ask God forgiveness for.

As for the rest of your post, it’s just a bunch of hilarious Trumpisms.

And, yes, I view someone who boasts of sexually assaulting women as a terrible person.
 
Okay, guess I was not going to lighten your unhappiness. Probably I will make matters worse because I think President Trump is the greatest President we have had since Theodore Roosevelt! All the Trump supporters are having a great time working together and we fight back with no apology.
 
GE and others probably haven’t seen much improvement.

But it’s ironic that Amazon, the company hated by Trump, has vastly improved. And CEO’s like Buffet, Dimon, and others continue to prop the economy as they have done for over a decade.
 
PaulinVA said:
So, I am not a Trump supporter. At All. I think he’s a terrible person.

But, what’s going on with the unemployment rate? Has he just not done anything to screw up the trend of the past nine years?

“The economy has been expanding for almost nine years, the second-longest streak on record. And employers have added jobs every month for seven and a half years”
Click to expand...
We need several years low black unemployment before I’ll give anyone credit. Obama could have gotten to the record with some policy changes, but they conflicted with his ideology goals.

What goes up, comes down (or what goes down, comes up). I’m sure we can blame Trump for that, when it happens 🙂
 
Theo520 said:
We need several years low black unemployment before I’ll give anyone credit. Obama could have gotten to the record with some policy changes, but they conflicted with his ideology goals.

What goes up, comes down (or what goes down, comes up). I’m sure we can blame Trump for that, when it happens 🙂
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i just read that black unemployment is at an all-time low. But it isn’t low enough, nor, as you mention, long enough.

My reason for this thread was really to discuss how much a President and his policies affect unemployment and the economy. As an example, Bush 43 is blamed for the recession, but it really started in Congress with a well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt by Congress at giving people mortgages (and increasing home ownership) that the mortgage industry knew, historically, could not repay mortgages. Add the greed in the mortgage and financial industry, and CRASH.

Was it Bush 43’s fault? I think a lot of people were to blame. Was the steady clawing back to prosperity soley Obama’s policies? Probably not.

So, after a year, what can Trump take credit for in keeping the upward curve going?
 
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ProVobis said:
Yeh, I hate to see it if interest rates ever came back to their historical levels so savers can again share the glee.
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cheer up. At least the fed is going to raise rates one more time this year for sure, perhaps more.
 
I think everyone acknowledges that GE was terribly mismanaged for years. Amazon is Amazon, beneficiary (and to large degree the creator) of a change in shopping patterns; “box stores” being the losers.

But while Dimon can be said to have a hand in improving the economy indirectly, Buffett really can’t. Buffett’s forte is early recognition of winning strategies of others. He, himself, doesn’t make a single product.
 
PaulinVA said:
So, after a year, what can Trump take credit for in keeping the upward curve going?
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Pretty obvious I thought
  • Both actual reduced regulation and the rhetoric of reduced regulation has increased business confidence and investment.
  • Tax cuts have demonstratively increased the rate of business investment. I posted an article on this some time ago, source was PBS
  • Reducing illegal economic migrants directly helps unemployed minorities find work. His anti-illegal rhetoric has been phenomenal for helping reduce black unemployment.
 
I don’t know if CD rates are immediately impacted by what the Fed does. The renewal rate on one of my 5% CD was less than .5%, If you project that over the entire country, interest income has been reduced dramatically. That’s part of the GNP if my economic knowledge is worth anything.
 
I remember many years ago looking at the high interest rates I was paying and wondering whether in the future CD rates and mortgage rates would be lower than I had theretofore seen in my life.

I was in banking myself then, and I had just read an article in one of the banking magazines breaking down the demographics of net savers and net borrowers. According to the article, everybody is a net borrower until about age 50, when he becomes a net saver. Knowing as I did about the baby boom and the “echo boom” after that, I began to wonder whether we would eventually see rates plummet and stay down for a long time simply due to demographics.

Seems to have happened. I can’t say that’s the reason, but it sure could be.
 
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