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The Small Story of 2012

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This is the time of year to look back and reflect.  What happened in 2012?  A lot of things happened, and yet when we look at the political and economic situation it appears that almost nothing happened at all.  About US 1.6M jobs were added during the year, but growth (change in GDP) remains at a near-recession 2% or less.  Politically, the election produced the same President and Congress who remain mired in gridlock, currently unable to get out of the “Fiscal Cliff” trap of their own making.  Europe has gone from bad to somewhat worse, proving that austerity isn’t going to help anyone.

What should we make of this year?  Not much, really.  There was not a big story in politics or economics that is worth re-hashing.  But there is a small story that has not been told.  Where did those 1.6M jobs come from, anyway?

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It’s All Good (except the bad stuff)

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The economy added 118k jobs in November, if you go by the ADP report, or 146k jobs if you go by the noisier official number.  Let’s call it 118k because we’ve consistently touted the value of the ADP report.  By any measure, it was a lot more than was expected, given the landfall of hurricane Sandy at the end of October.

Now that the election is over, there is growing optimism that the economy is indeed … growing.  It’s not a lot, but it’s there.  And that’s where we stand as we move into the next phase of the political season – the part defined by getting down to work and making use of the mandate given by voters.  That mandate is clearly defined by a divided Congress and a Democratic President who are at odds over how to either avoid the Fiscal Cliff or, perhaps, go over it.

Even if the election didn’t tell us much, the economy is.  We’d be wise to listen to it.

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It’s Clearly Different

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Consumer confidence, as measured by a survey plugged into a magic formula, is at the highest level in nearly five years.  Housing prices have risen for the sixth straight month.  All is attributed to improvements in employment, something rarely noted in the media over the summer but felt by people all across the US.

The long answer is that everyone who watches this never believed that employment was improving much.  Employment growth leading the overall economy hasn’t been the way recessions have run since the end of WWII.  That alone tells us that this time is different.  What makes it different is important because it highlights what Barataria readers have been clued into since 2007 and urgently since 2008 – that this is at the very least a different kind of economic event.

Call it what you will, but there can be little doubt that different times call for different measures.

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Party on the Jobs Report!

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The news was electrifying just one month before the election.  Unemployment rate down to 7.8%!  Decent gains in employment all around!  After an August report so dismal it spurred the Fed into action with an open-ended round of mortgage buying, QE3, how could September’s come in so strong?

The answer is obvious to longtime readers of Barataria, since it was called when the August report came out.  We’re seeing fluctuations caused by sketchy methods of calculating the state of jobs, a small number found by subtracting a big number from another big number.  Indeed, the best part of the gain came from adjusting July and August up by 89k jobs total.

Underneath the big story is a much bigger story that is going unreported through this gradual turnaround.  We are witnessing the printing of a strong bottom, a floor in the overall employment picture where we are roughly treading water.  What makes this possible, and hard to report, is the net gain of jobs in unexpected places that the traditional survey is having a lot of trouble finding.

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Summer’s End

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It’s the end of the third quarter of 2012, which is a decent time to look back and see where we are.   Economic news has been incredibly mixed lately, which following our mantra that good news is bad news means that we really don’t know what to think.  So let’s not try to think too hard and look ahead as we look backward at a strange quarter all around.

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