PALM CITYS HORSE TALK; ONE MORE WEEK OF OUR ECONOMY

OVERVIEW ~ May 3 through May 7, 2010 ~ It was an extraordinarily erratic week. Concerns about the debt crisis in the European Union had a powerful impact on the markets, with stock markets (including American markets) falling, interest rate yields in America plunging, the price of oil declining, gold managing “flight-to-quality” gains, and the euro falling against the dollar. Also extraordinary was Thursday afternoon’s temporary plunge of more than 1,000 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which may have been caused by automatic selling programs and problems in other stock market technology. The decline continued on Friday, and a good employment report for April was unable to curtail the stock markets’ slide. The employment report, though, remains significant and is worth a closer look.

FOCUS ~ Not only did the American economy add 290,000 new payroll jobs in April, revisions to the number of jobs added in February and March showed a further growth of 121,000. And there is little to detract from the economy’s achievement. The number of jobs wasn’t inflated by the hiring of temporary government census workers. Nearly all of the job growth in April resulted from private-sector hiring.

Professional and business service occupations accounted for about 80,000 new jobs; manufacturing was responsible for 44,000; there were even 14,000 new jobs for construction workers.

Why, then, did the unemployment rate climb from 9.7% to 9.9%?
The new payroll data is gathered through telephone surveys of American businesses. But the unemployment rate is tallied from an entirely different survey in which households are called and people are asked how many members of the household are working, how many are not working but are looking for work, and how many have given up looking for work (often temporarily). Those who are unemployed but not looking for work are not considered part of the civilian labor force and are not included in the computation of the unemployment rate.

Notice, though, that the number of Americans looking for work begins to grow as people regain confidence that there may be jobs available to them. Thus, 805,000 potential workers began again to look for a job in April, obviously far more than the number of available new jobs. The bad news, therefore, is that the economy still hasn’t recovered enough to provide all the jobs our workers need. Far from it. But the good news is that the job market seems finally to have entered a recovery. Thus, the employment report for April, despite the higher unemployment rate, is very good, on balance. It confirms the view that the economic recovery is advancing.
PALM CITYS HORSE TALK:  PHOTOS: BEAUTIFUL MARTIN RANCHES, JUST 15 minutes west of PALM CITY, FLORIDA and is absolutely beautiful. 20 acres $425,000 pristine property. Cattle, horses, HOA in place with beautiful upkeep of this gated community.  One of a kind.  Last high and dry lot left.
See my website, http://www.mysunflowerfarmsfl.com/