Job data worse than it looks?

Since April total employment from the Employer Survey has increased by just 158,000. That comes to just 39,500 new jobs per month. Using the Household survey data showed that there has actually been a loss of 47,000 jobs. Since March, 237,000 jobs have been lost. Remember Goolsbee's point that one month alone doesn't make a trend? Well, what about four months? From Reuters.

Nonfarm payrolls were unchanged, the Labor Department said on Friday, the weakest reading since September. Economists had expected a gain of 75,000 jobs. The report underscored the frail economy and kept fears of a recession on investors' radar.

"The economy is slowly grinding to a halt. The problem, however, on the policy side is that I wonder whether the numbers are truly weak enough to galvanize a political response," said Steve Blitz, senior economist at ITG in New York. . . .

Adding to the weak tenor of the report, nonfarm employment for June and July was revised to show 58,000 fewer jobs.

The average workweek dropped to 34.2 hours, the fewest since January, from 34.3 hours. Average hourly earnings fell three cents. . . .

Well, there was "recovery summer" in 2010, how Obama was taking credit for the drop in unemployment rates at the beginning of this year, signs that the economy was mending in May 2009, and "better days ahead" in September 2010.

A pretty obvious note on the problems with the Employer Survey report.

It includes alleged statistical quackery. The Labor Department statisticians use a controversial “birth-death model” to try to estimate each month how many new businesses were created and how many firms have gone out of business. Ultimately these changes show up on tax records, so the government can check how close its estimates were. But in the meantime, economists love to throw bricks at this model. Many just don’t think it works. Jim O’Sullivan of MF Global said it drives him crazy when analysts take the results of the birth-death model and simply add or subtract it from the headline job number. . . .

8 in 10 think that we are in a recession.

Confidence in the economy is poor, with eight in 10 Americans believing the nation is in a recession, according to a new poll on Friday.

One-third of those surveyed in a CNN/ORC poll think the recession is serious even though, by definition, the U.S. is not in a recession.

A recession is when the economy experiences two straight quarters of negative growth. In the past quarter, the economy grew on an annualized basis of 1 percent.

However, economic performance is often linked to expectations and confidence in the economy. For example, those who view the economic outlook as bleak will save more and spend less, leading to an even weaker economy.

The public’s economic outlook has been worse in the past. In September 2009, nearly nine in 10 Americans thought the country was still in a recession. In June 2011, 48 percent of respondents in another CNN/ORC poll said they feared the country was descending into another Great Depression.

About two-thirds of respondents to Friday’s poll said the president should focus more on creating jobs, as opposed to deficit reduction. . . .