Today I’m continuing my never-ending series about the wacky world of government employment numbers.
Hey, it’s an election year, so don’t yell at me if everyone — myself included — is obsessed with the economy and jobs!
But because this stuff is making even me dizzy there will again be an intermission in this column when you can clear your head — or perhaps beat your head against a wall.
I’ll let you choose.
For starters, since this is already Tuesday, you know by now that the official job growth figures for March sucked.
Wall Street had been expecting March’s job growth number to be about 200,000, which, considering all we’ve been through, wouldn’t have been so hot either.
With all that Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve has done to keep interest rates low, and with all the money Washington is spending, the economy should be creating 400,000 to 500,000 jobs a month.
The country is still around 5 million jobs short of where it was before the recession began.
If Wall Street hasn’t already, pretty soon it will be spreading rumors that the Fed will be forced to do another easing of credit conditions. And if stocks keep falling like they did yesterday, with the Dow Jones industrial average down 1 percent, or 130.55 points, on the first trading day following the March jobs report, the Fed might encourage those rumors.
Another Quantitative Easing — the printing of money — would be useless unless the intention is to create inflation and/or bail out the stock market.
A big jobs gain in March would have all but doomed the QE speculation. Wall Street was lucky in that sense.
Now I’ll get to the part of this column that’ll probably make you dizzy.
Longtime readers already understand the difference between seasonally adjusted numbers and raw data that isn’t changed for what the Labor Department computers think is supposed to happen at a certain time of year.
January job growth, you might remember, was heralded as encouraging. But if you looked at that month’s unadjusted employment figures — which I did at the time — there was actually a huge drop in employment that month.
Guess what?
The raw data shows that March’s growth — before being reported as an adjusted 120,000 jobs — wasn’t really so bad.
Without seasonal adjustments Labor found there were 132.010 million jobs in the US in March, up from 131.199 million in February. The one-month gain: 811,000 jobs.
That’s a pretty healthy number, even though it wasn’t as large as the 913,000 unadjusted increase in new jobs during the February to March period of 2011.
Why the drop-off this year? Remember, the winter of 2011 was cold and snowy. This past winter was very nice in most of the country.
Labor’s seasonal adjustments were expecting people to be laid off during this past winter and then rehired in the same numbers as last year.
The unadjusted figure was disappointing, so the headline-adjusted number was, also.
This is a hell of a way to run a country.
***
Intermission: Take a break or a nap. Be back in five minutes.
The International Franchise Expo is moving to Gotham City this June after 20 years in Washington. You probably already have your vacation scheduled so you won’t miss it.
Franchises — think Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts, etc. — keep more than 20 million people employed in this country. And when folks can’t find other jobs they’ll often use savings to buy a franchise.
That’s the advertisement; now for the good part.
I asked the International Franchise Association for a list of the zaniest franchise ideas. Here are some of them:
* Eternal Ascent: America’s leading balloon-based aerial “cremains” disposal franchise. In other words, this’ll give your loved one a lift halfway to heaven.
* Pet Dreams Memorial Center: Pet funeral-service franchise. Franchisees pick up after your dog . . . is dead.
* Porno Pizza: A pizza plus porn delivery franchise. Gives new meaning to the question: What kind of toppings would you like?
* 1-800-AUTOPSY: A mobile franchise that picks up and delivers tissues and organs. You should only become a franchisee if you are very organ-ized.
* Doctor Fish Pedicure: Salon-type franchise where customers dunk their feet in a warm-water bath filled with tiny carp that nibble off the dead skin cells. Ewww! Give me bloodsucking leeches any day. Fortunately, they don’t use piranhas.
And lastly,
* Doorologist: A franchise that serves all of your door needs. And do I have to say it? Salesmen obviously solicit door to door.
Intermission is over: Back to your seats, please.
***
As if all the stuff I mentioned before the break wasn’t confusing enough, the job market will be harder to read over the next few months because of the dreaded (at least among my editors) Birth/Death Model.
Labor will add hundreds of thousands of jobs to its count over the next quarter for positions it thinks — but can’t prove — are being created by newly formed companies.