U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally

attached workers, plus total employed

part time for economic reasons, as a

percent of the civilian labor force

plus all marginally attached workers

17.5 %

A Reader Asks "How Did 558,000 People

Lose Their Jobs When Only 190,000

Jobs Were Lost?"

Here is an excerpt from today's Bureau of Labor Statistics Non-farm Payrolls report."The unemployment rate rose from 9.8 to 10.2 percent in October, and nonfarmpayroll employment continued to decline (-190,000), the U.S. Bureau of LaborStatistics reported today. The largest job losses over the month were in con-struction, manufacturing, and retail trade.
Household Survey Data
In October, the number of unemployed persons increased by 558,000 to 15.7million. The unemployment rate rose by 0.4 percentage point to 10.2 percent,the highest rate since April 1983. Since the start of the recession inDecember 2007, the number of unemployed persons has risen by 8.2 million,and the unemployment rate has grown by 5.3 percentage points...
The civilian labor force participation rate was little changed over the monthat 65.1 percent. The employment-population ratio continued to decline inOctober, falling to 58.5 percent."
An astute reader noticed that the BLS press release says that 190,000 jobs were lost from payroll employment, but the number of unemployed persons increased by 558,000. What's up with that?
The BLS report consists of two independent data samples. BLS has two monthly surveys that measure employment levels and trends: the Current Population Survey (CPS), also known as the household survey, and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey, also known as the payroll or establishment survey.
There is the "Establishment Survey" which is based on responses from a sample of about 400,000 business establishments, about one-third of total nonfarm payroll employment. The headline payroll number, the job loss of 190,000, is based on this data. ( Power more at )

Gold suppression is public policy and public

record, not 'conspiracy theory'

Submitted by cpowell

on Sat,2009-11-07

18:16. Section:
Essays

Remarks by Chris Powell, Secretary/TreasurerGold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.International Precious Metals and Commodities Show Olympia Park, Munich, GermanySaturday,
November 7, 2009

Thank you for coming to listen to me today. Please forgive my inability to speak German. I'll be discussing many documents, some of them fairly complicated, but don't worry if you miss something about them. They'll be posted at GATA's Internet site with these remarks.
On Friday, September 25, Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for the Omnis consulting firm in McLean, Virginia., was interviewed on the cable television network CNBC in the United States. Talking about the currency markets, Rickards remarked: "When you own gold you're fighting every central bank in the world." ( Power more at )

Select Quotes

Democracy has been diluted by the actions we have taken to get out of this crisis.
The government is willing to willy nilly print money to prevent any bank from going into receivership which I think is a galacticly bad idea.
Credit derivatives added to the problems by providing leverage and opacity.
They increased people’s ability to borrow in hidden ways.
There is a lot of debt in the system that is invisible. And banks themselves were often running invisible hedge funds.
The legacy investment banks were running invisible hedge funds, but so were our major banks, and that includes JPMorgan, and Citigroup Bank of America.
Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) were overrated and overpriced the minute they came to market. If that wasn’t enough, investment banks were creating these things in their financial meth labs , knowingly selling things they knew or should have known were overrated and overpriced.
In 2007 when it was clear that this activity should be shut down, because we had mortgage lenders failing throughout the country, instead of shutting down the financial meth labs, the investment banks sped up, they accelerated the bad deals they were bringing to market.
Many of them were just phony secutritizations with no other purpose than to hide losses.
I was hopeful that when someone like Obama came in, there would be meaningful change.
If anything, the situation has gotten worse. But this is bipartisan. You’ll notice that President Bush when he was in office, he elevated Roland Arnold who was the head of Ameriquest, that had been involved in alleged mortgage fraud, massive, sued by almost every state in the union, and he was elevated to the position of Ambassador to the Netherlands.
The Netherlands did not even like it.
This was not a model issue.
This was a management issue. We had people who knew or should have known they were selling things that were value destroying securitizations, and their sale provided money to lenders were originating fraudulent loans, overrated by complicit rating agencies.

Janet Tavakoli is a straight shooter and an equal party basher. You have to like that.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Stacy Blog:

Barbarians at the gate of a gas guzzling empire

November 2nd, 2009

by stacyherbert

Stacy Summary: From what I can tell looking at history, all peoples of every empire at its peak, just before its imminent collapse, belligerently maintain their lifestyles at all cost to their own wealth and their own chance of survival. For a number of reasons, you cannot talk them into saving themselves.
While thousands upon thousands of hours are spent in America, for example, trying to prove that spewing exhaust and carbon into the air is, in fact, perfectly natural with zero cost and that there is, also, in fact, (according to one Big Oil study) enough fresh water, fertile land and oil to provide for a doubling of the global consumer class for thousands of years into the future, Americans (most who, by the way, believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old) continue to insist with an almost religious fervor on getting from point A to point B in the most inefficient manner.
Again, from my reading of history, it is impossible to fight this sort of end of empire bankruptcy of morals, wealth and, most importantly, ideas. The American empire and her citizens want to blow it on oil, so that’s how they will do it. No amount of science or reasoning can stop them. And as they will use any means necessary to get whatever oil remains, it makes no sense to try to develop your own economy using a resource that the Empire has devoted all their military might toward securing. The British, Dutch, French, Germans and other Europeans did not dare stand in the way of Spain’s maniacal quest for gold in the New World; instead, they took the gold-less lands and with them developed manufacturing and trade routes in sugar, cotton, wheat, fur, etc. (Power more at )

This is NOT good

Debt Slave Bait and

Audit the Fed Bill Gutted:

What You Can Do

This should come as no surprise but Ron Paul says Federal Reserve Policy Audit Legislation ‘Gutted’Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has called for an end to the Federal Reserve, said legislation he introduced to audit monetary policy has been “gutted” while moving toward a possible vote in the Democratic-controlled House.
The bill, with 308 co-sponsors, has been stripped of provisions that would remove Fed exemptions from audits of transactions with foreign central banks, monetary policy deliberations, transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee and communications between the Board, the reserve banks and staff, Paul said today.
“There’s nothing left, it’s been gutted,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is not a partisan issue. People all over the country want to know what the Fed is up to, and this legislation was supposed to help them do that.” ( Power more at )