Our financial system is crumbling this week.

[Swingingbunt]

It's also worth noting many people who have had jobs are doing so at reduced salaries and those being hired are taking jobs at pay in the 10-30 percentile range. Those positive numbers are certainly a start, but they aren't so golden when you take a magnifying glass to the situation.

People being hired is always better than the alternative, but I definitely agree with this Kird. Anyone know what - if any - effect tax season gives to temp hiring?

[AdmiralKird]

It's also worth noting many people who have had jobs are doing so at reduced salaries and those being hired are taking jobs at pay in the 10-30 percentile range. Those positive numbers are certainly a start, but they aren't so golden when you take a magnifying glass to the situation.

People being hired is always better than the alternative, but I definitely agree with this Kird. Anyone know what - if any - effect tax season gives to temp hiring?

Judging from 2008 IRS data, 1.1M paid preparers signed tax forms that year. Based on the firm I work at, about three cpa's work on and sign the forms, another three including myself and one temporary intern work on reports. If this is any barometer, that means there's one temp hire for every 1/3 of a signer. 330,000 in a country of about 340 million, and a lot of those are students outside the unemployment numbers. Of course other businesses hire some temps for just updating their books, but from what I've seen, a lot of smaller companies just throw whatever they have at the tax firms and pay them to sort through their mess rather than hiring someone out of their element for more than it would cost to just have the work outsourced, and larger corporations probably have their books in much better shape with automated software rather than hiring people temporarily to use unfamiliar systems to get data in order that could cost them millions of dollars for a bad account. I'd say at max it would be around 1M temps, with half coming from outside the labor market. Of course I could be wrong since I'm using such a small firm as a basis, but its all I know to go off of.

[Swingingbunt]

Thanks, Kird. I always find it hard to trust unemployment numbers around Christmas, but was never sure when I could expect them to "normalize" afterword.

[Socnorb11]

It's also worth noting many people who have had jobs are doing so at reduced salaries and those being hired are taking jobs at pay in the 10-30 percentile range. Those positive numbers are certainly a start, but they aren't so golden when you take a magnifying glass to the situation.

People being hired is always better than the alternative, but I definitely agree with this Kird. Anyone know what - if any - effect tax season gives to temp hiring?

I would have to think it's a stretch to think that tax season has any impact. Are you talking about temps being hired to help prepare taxes? How is that any different than hotels beefing up in the summer time for tourists, or teaching assistants getting jobs in the fall?

[Arthur Dent]

The headline unemployment numbers are seasonally adjusted, which means they apply a formula that's suppossed to correct for things like tax season and Christmas shopping based on historical trends. The formula can break down when the historical patterns shift, but to first order, something like tax season should not cause unemployment to drop. Actually, the unadjusted unemployment rate is currently higher at 8.8%.

[vinsanity]

I would have to think it's a stretch to think that tax season has any impact. Are you talking about temps being hired to help prepare taxes? How is that any different than hotels beefing up in the summer time for tourists, or teaching assistants getting jobs in the fall?

To be fair; there was a bump in employment during the census awhile back.

The biggest thing is that even government funded/caused temporary employment works. My favorite example is Indy. We've talked about building a rail system, like the Metro Link, for years. Well you need hundreds maybe thousands of construction works to lay the lines. They are working in and around Indy for months on end. Many of them may be out currently out of work construction workers. So the state sends their company a check and the company pays the workers. Those workers take their paychecks and buy lunch or groceries in or around Indy while they are working. Those restaurants hire new waitresses to fill the new demand, the grocery stores need new checkout workers or stock people. Those people have jobs and frequent new bars/restaurants/shops who now need more employees to fill that new demand. Who patronize car dealerships who need sales people or other groceries who need more stock people.

So those 500 construction jobs may be temporary. But the money they spend is more likely to encourage hiring or growth of other businesses. Rather than say having a restaurant owner who doesn't have customers. If you give him another $50k for his business, he's not going to hire another server cause he has extra money. He doesn't have the demand to justify it. You need to stimulate demand, and you can't do that by trying to cheapen the supply side.

tl;dr - Doesn't matter if the jobs are temporary. A focused uptick in temporary employment can have great benefits.

[vinsanity]

Reading this article on why the middle class creates job, not the wealthy. It had a link to some interesting factoids about wealth inequality in this country here.

I know people like to give Dems/Obama crap about redistributing wealth. There is plenty of redistribution going on, from the bottom up that is.

[SHOW]

Wages for most stagnate, while CEO's and Corporations rake in profits.

[SHOW]

[G. Keenan]

One of my pet peeves is how the news, every day, always attributes a rise or fall in the stock market to what they themselves reported that day. Today's example is that markets fell on "news" that the Greece is closer to default.

I don't buy it. Anyone with a pulse could have told you 8 months ago that Greece is either going to default or exit the Eurozone. If there are traders who have been operating under the notion that a Greek default is going to be avoided they need to have their head examined.

[Michael]

One of my pet peeves is how the news, every day, always attributes a rise or fall in the stock market to what they themselves reported that day. Today's example is that markets fell on "news" that the Greece is closer to default.

I don't buy it. Anyone with a pulse could have told you 8 months ago that Greece is either going to default or exit the Eurozone. If there are traders who have been operating under the notion that a Greek default is going to be avoided they need to have their head examined.

If it's a slow news day and the market falls they call it "profit taking".


I think this is an interesting article regarding market volatility:

A Bar May Be the Place to Understand Markets

In reality, of course, markets are often whacked by external events such as bank failures and policy announcements. But in these models, tumultuous market plunges can also emerge from nothing more than a chance momentary concentration of investors’ strategies -- a crowd-like similarity in thinking and behavior. There are periods when many market participants see patterns they interpret similarly. As a result, they react similarly and in concert, yet in a way that no one sees coming in advance.

This kind of natural herding leads to the so-called fat- tailed statistics of markets, reflecting their susceptibility to large crashes and rallies over minutes, hours and months. It also leads to many other more subtle, but realistic, features of real markets, such as their “long memory” -- an episode of high market volatility now has measurable effects lasting as long as 10 years into the future. None of these things emerges in any natural way from traditional equilibrium models.

The author has a more advanced blog post here.

[Hungary Jack]

This is the Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Soeder.

I am sure the Greeks, Italians and Spaniards feel that he is in character.

[SHOW]