Do you hear this from time to time? ‘The economy is stronger than expected,’ or ‘the economic indicators are better than expected.’ You can ask, “Whose economy are we talking about?” “Whose expectations are those?” Here are a few facts that would seem to anchor us in reality.

Bankruptcy Filings: 5,300 per day from JAN-MARCH, 2009. For the entire year of 2009, that would add up to over 1,300,000 bankruptcies. In 2006, the rate was about 2,000 per day. The rate had been rising steadily since then.

Official Unemployment Rate: 8.9%. It’s rising steadily. The Dept. of Labor says, “The number of unemployed persons increased by 563,000 to 13.7 million in April.” Economist Mark Zandi suggests it will level off at 10% a year from now. Obama advisers are forecasting the unemployment level will not decline until the end of 2010, i.e. NEXT year. That’s a year and a half from now.

Official Underemployment Rate: 15.8%. This is called U-6, the estimate of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. It’s more realistic than the official rate reported.

Home Prices: “Four years of gains in home prices wiped out.” That’s the national estimate using the S&P Case-Shiller Index for the top 20 cities.

Home Foreclosures: 342,000 households received at least one foreclosure-related notice in April. That’s a 32-percent increase compared with April of last year.

Stock Market Crash: Last November, Market Watch said the S&P 500 Index was at its lowest level in more than a decade and had lost almost half of its value in a year. Today, the index is 883, down further from last November when it was 929. The market watch reporter said, “Call it the Great Give-Back.”

NEW Unemployed People: 637,000 workers lost their jobs and filed a first-time claim for unemployment money in the week ending May 9. This is what’s going on every week. Never mind the academic talk. It has the feel of a humanitarian disaster . . . each and every week.

President Herbert Hoover, a great believer in statistics, said that the 1930 census would “show the first real determination of unemployment” and would prove his contention that “the worst effects of the crash . . . have passed.”

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– Byron

References:

New York Times, May 10, 2009.
The Jobless Rate, Slow to Improve, Tests Obama.

Market Watch, May 16, 2009.
Four years of gains in home prices wiped out.

ABC News, May 13, 2009.
RealtyTrac: April Foreclosures Rise 32 Percent.

Market Watch, Nov 21, 2008.
Are stocks cheap? It depends on earnings..