The figures come from the industry breakdown of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' new employment numbers [pdf]. Jobs in the print publishing category—that includes newspapers, magazines, and books as well as direct-mail shops and the like—have declined from 863,600 last November to 776,800 last month—a 10% drop (those are seasonably adjusted figures). Last month alone saw a 4.2% decline in print jobs, helped by massive bloodletting at the Associated Press, Business Week, Time Inc., and elsewhere.

And those numbers explicitly exclude internet-based jobs, which don't appear to be tracked separately. So the total number of media workers laid off in the last year is almost certainly substantially higher.

Overall, the new job figures are being described as a small improvement, given the downtick in the unemployment rate. But the largest single employment sector to add jobs in the last month was temporary services, with an increase of 52,000. And the largest drop in unemployment was among teenagers. These are not quality jobs.

And this paragraph from the BLS's release should provide some sobering context:

About 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in November, an increase of 376,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

But there's good news: Employment in commercial banking increased by 1,000 jobs, or about 1%. They always win, don't they?

The clip above is of Obama on the campaign trail nailing McCain for economic Pollyannaism. Here, according to the AP, is what he has to say about the economy today:

President Barack Obama said Monday the nation's economy is in good shape for the long term thanks to "core strengths" such as its universities, its innovation and a dynamic workforce.

[snip]

"There are core strengths to the American economy that will put us in good stead over the long term," Obama said. He said the key is bridging that gap toward a more prosperous time and promised the gathered reporters he won't let up "until businesses are investing again and businesses are hiring again."

You could make a case that McCain's "fundamentals" line is probably more responsible for Obama's victory than anything else either candidate said during the campaign. Candidate Obama's rhetorical response to McCain was, "Senator McCain, what economy are you talking about?" We're inclined to ask President Obama what "core strengths" he is talking about. The AP cites universities, innovation, and a dynamic work force—"fundamentals of the economy" that existed back when Obama was pillorying McCain for his misstep last year. In fact, the workforce considerably larger then. Today we're at 10.2 percent unemployment.

For Obama to utter a similarly thoughtless remark at a time when more people are out of work, and when the economy—as a function of how it's actually experienced by human beings, as opposed to a grab-bag of statistical indicators—is arguably worse than it was a year ago doesn't speak well for his ability to inspire confidence in the recovery. We'd be shocked if the Republicans, who have lately found traction in hitting Obama on the lack of job creation, don't attack him over the "core strengths" line with the same vigor that he directed at McCain for the "fundamentals" line. He deserves it. We just hope it doesn't resonate as strongly as it did last year.

Granted, McCain was clueless enough to make his comment on the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and the fact that he could offer sunny, optimistic language in the midst of a financial panic that threatened to derail the global financial system spoke volumes about his comprehension of the problem. Obama is speaking at the beginning of an anemic recovery, when it makes sense for the president to adopt a boosterish stance. But Obama ought to know better than anyone exactly how disconsonant such happy-talk can sound when people are actually suffering, and living off food pantries, because they can't get jobs.

We frankly don't understand Roubini's latest apocalyptic pronouncement, published yesterday in the FT, but it has something to do with how "quantitative easing" and "hot money" have created another massive asset bubble that is going to burst and kill us all. Everybody's borrowing in dollars—which we guess the Fed actually will pay you to do, like you get a free dollar for every five you borrow, or something—and investing in the Third World, and it's the "mother of all carry trades" and will ruin the world when the dollar rebounds, which we thought was supposed to be a good thing, but you can't win for losing and Nouriel Roubini will crush your dreams one way or another. It's what doom merchants do. Like the beleaguered Mayan eschatologists busy selling Sony's upcoming 2012, he's simply satisfying a market demand for a framework that renders our generalized anxieties sensible and justified.

And he's got to pay for all those parties at his vulva-studded TriBeCa loft somehow. Last night—on the very day his latest black pronouncement was published—Roubini had Wall Street II director Oliver Stone and some ladies over for post-Halloween merriment. Or, as Roubini put it his Facebook update: "We hanged out."

Sure it's so great to watch as the US economy "Roars to life," as the media puts it, in a lie. What is really roaring? Profits at Exxon, the most profitable of profitmaking enterprises ever undertaken for the purpose of profiteering, is down by 68%. At Versace, where every employee is forced to get a tattoo that says "Opulence" immediately upon being hired, a full quarter of the staff is going to be laid off. Diamond merchants are no longer shiny. We're killing each other over yogurt.

Things are spiraling out of control.

As "The Media" celebrates a return to normalcy, turning its gaze away from the shivering Bronx tenants hanging banners out their windows begging for heat in order to focus on 13 billion year-old megastar explosions, it is incumbent upon us to ask: What gaineth the USA if we see the most distant object ever seen yet lose 38% of LA's homeless population, and we don't even know where they are or who may have eaten them?

We gaineth naught, friends. We gaineth naught.

Steven Levitt is probably a Very Good Economist, but he has proven again and again and again that this Using Economics To Explain The World thing is utter bullshit. And he and Dubner invented this pop-econ trend that is the most annoying application of make-believe science since pop-psychology. At least pop-psychology gave us Hitchcock movies! All we can hope for from these two is a shitty Soderbergh movie in which the twist is that becoming a gay serial killer was a rational consumer choice.

So. The first book, in its attempt to be interesting, was a series of Slate-y unexpected conclusions that seemed to have been reached before they went to the trouble of misapplying a bunch of research. Conventional wisdom wrong! Abortion good!

Their baby name chapter was not refuting "conventional wisdom" unless your idea of mainstream consensus is a racist talk radio joke—and their list of names that should be skyrocketing in popularity is about 50% correct, which is how well you'd do if you took a "throwing darts at the most popular baby names" list approach to predictions. The abortion chapter completely misrepresented research on the Romanian abortion ban. The bit on the KKK was based on the exaggerated, unscientific tall tales of beloved old activist Stetson Kennedy.

In other words, like most pop science, it was not very scientific. And furthermore, neoclassical microeconomics is just as flawed a method of examining individual behavior as Freudian psychology.

In the sequel book, they've taken the "conventional wisdom is wrong!!!!" thing too far. Drunk driving good! Curtailing carbon emissions bad!

Now, primarily because of the stupid climate change chapter, a bunch of people who formerly would've defended Levitt and Dubner are calling them irresponsible morons. Which is great! But the book will still sell a zillion copies and now a bunch of idiots will have all these completely wrong but controversial things to say about global warming at parties, which will be annoying.

After receiving your own totally worthless liberal arts education in an institution of higher learning (weed joke), you may have assumed, based upon your rudimentary, worthless understanding of economics, that a sever economic crisis would cause people to pay less for education, since they would understand that going to college puts you in debt and will not get you a job. Wrong you are. US college tuition went up 6.5% last year. Shows how good your college was, sucker.

A New Jersey lawyer had a pimp for a client; while the pimp went to jail, the lawyer took over his pimping business, and gave freebies to a bunch of law enforcement types. You might think the legal system would overlook this sort of thing, because the man was from Jersey. But no.

Six women in NYC "have been charged with submitting fraudulent documents - including forged police reports and court orders - to portray themselves as victims of domestic violence in an apparent attempt to jump to the front of a long waiting list for government subsidized apartments." A woman who wants to be an abuse victim? That's crazy! The recession does crazy things though. It really does.

Police saw a Massachusetts man "carrying a suspicious bag." Hey, they asked him, what's in that suspicious bag? Oh, just my wife's sex toys, he said. But then the police looked inside the bag and really it was full of stolen goods, and not even one sex toy. Disappointed? Sure, they probably were, but that's how it goes in a recession like this. Sometimes you get the bag full of golden dildos, and sometimes you get surprised.
[Pic via]

Econometric expert Daniel Gross speculates that Conde Nast's closing of Gourmet may mark the bottom—the trough, if you will—of the bad times for the magazine industry. It's an interesting piece. But I'd put my money on "when the last remaining print magazine company is bought by Google for a piddling sum, as a plaything." I'm no economist though!


Katie Couric's advice to college students: "Don't let the turkeys get you down." You just can't hear that one enough.


Turns out that Russians love George Will. Good. We hate him.


The AP is considering charging subscribers to receive their news exclusively about a half hour before all the non-paying bloodsuckers get it. Which is a pretty creative idea! But, possible scenario: Someone subscribes to the exclusive early feed; then they post those stories immediately on their website; then people read them there, for free. It's crazy, but it just might happen.

It's all obviously a charade in which everyone pretends that expectations for this woman were so low that her ability to read lies written by some anonymous party functionary was somehow surprising. But these very different reports on how her little talk was received are fun.

The New York Times on reactions to Sarah Palin's speech to Hong Kong investors:

A number of people who heard the speech in a packed hotel ballroom, which was closed to the media, said Mrs. Palin spoke from notes for 90 minutes and that she was articulate, well-prepared and even compelling.

"The speech was wide-ranging, very balanced, and she beat all expectations," said Doug A. Coulter, head of private equity in the Asia-Pacific region for LGT Capital Partners.

"She didn't sound at all like a far-right-wing conservative. She seemed to be positioning herself as a libertarian or a small-c conservative," he said, adding that she mentioned both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. "She brought up both those names."

The Times of London on reactions to same:

Several audience members reportedly walked out of Ms Palin's speech 30 minutes before the end, citing "more important things to do" or describing the talk as "too partisan and too much like a speech at the Republican convention".

One senior fund manager told The Times that the 80-minute lecture, and the lack of an opportunity to fire any questions at Ms Palin, was a disappointment. "You would think that with her team of speechwriters and a supposedly media-free environment Palin could have afforded to be either funny or thought-provoking, but she was neither," she said.

Curious!

[Photo: AP]

Just as an example to illustrate this economic principle, we're going to use Japan, as I hinted in the last sentence. Handily there is a story about them in the newspaper today that applies to just what we're discussing here. "Once Slave to Luxury, Japan Catches Thrift Bug." From slavery to buggery. They just can't win!

Why is it that they can't win over there, in Japan? It all has to do with economics, as I mentioned, if you were paying attention. Instead of going Up from Slavery, a la Booker T., the Japanesans went—where?—down from slavery! Down, to thriftiness! Wrong way, kids!

Here is where we roll out the principle itself, or "economic way to be": You have to spend money to make money. Sounds counterintuitive, right? Then you must be Japanese, or just not a rich person at this moment in time, due to economic ignorance. All you have to do is read the LA Times, a popular newspaper in America, where it says very clearly that if all you "savers" out there don't turn into "spenders" right quick, we're going to be going right down the same path as Japan, economically, which is not a good one in case you haven't picked up on that particular fact.

"But hey," I hear you whining hypothetically while motivated by economic ignorance, "isn't saving money good, since spending all our money and not saving is what got us into this mess?" You might think so as a layperson. Well here's another thing an economic layperson might think is "cool": a broken coffee maker that busts a water line and next thing you know it one community college is out $150k in repair bills thanks to a god damn coffee maker some asshole left on.

Funny? Sure. But not economic. This illustrates what's know as "The Fallacy of the Layperson." You don't know what's good for the economy. You're the type of person who would lose the "opportunity cost" of a shitload of repair bills in order to "Laugh" at a whole school getting busted up because of a stupid coffee maker. This is why we have scientists, and, thankfully, economists around. Spend your money, people. Japan is our enemy.
[Pic via]

Oh, look, we got an invite!

Hong Kong - 31 August 2009 - CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, Asia's leading independent brokerage and investment group, will host the former Governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, in her first international speaking engagement outside North America.

Palin will address CLSA clients and delegates in a keynote speech at the 16th CLSA Investors' Forum to be held in Hong Kong from 21-25 September. Palin joins a list of noted global leaders including Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Alan Greenspan who have chosen the CLSA Investors' Forum as their platform of choice to reach global institutional fund managers and CEO's of Asia's leading listed corporations.

Noted global leaders Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Alan Greenspan, and Sarah Palin! Hah, one of these things is not like the other. (Alan Greenspan is the only one who broke a whole fucking country.)

Oh, the reason Palin is speaking to these investors, after spending months accepting speaking invites and then canceling at the last minute claiming she never agreed to them, is because she has signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, which is sort of this big scam company that you send hundreds of thousands of dollars to, and then they send you various liars and frauds.

Palin speeches are expected to go for "six figures apiece," but if you want someone to have written them down for her beforehand, that'll probably be extra.

And she's "about 85 percent finished with her book, due out this spring from HarperCollins"! The book sounds like it is so far about marathons she has attended and baskets she has scored. Palin was paid millions of dollars to write this book, which will be a collection of blog posts about fat hipsters.

She is going to be very, very wealthy, and this is all before she decides on a TV or radio gig, and also there is a Liberal Media Plot against her.

The New York state government took $140 million of the Obama stimulus money, and, along with $35 million from Soros, decided to give it to poor kids. But only poor kids! Sure, they are going to immediately go spend that money on school supplies, because poor families are not traditionally known for saving and investing effectively, and that will "stimulate" the economy and help poor kids, but we all know that giving money to poor kids is pointless and irresponsible.

That is why Drudge highlighted this miserable story of mothers in the Bronx taking the free money to buy uniforms for their kids, this morning. Presumably we're meant to skip to this bit at the end:

Paterson's Republican critics blasted the giveaway, saying he should spend the money to reduce property taxes.

"It is a plan that is ripe for fraud and abuse," said Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos. "This is a totally irresponsible use of federal stimulus money."

Yes, right, lowering property taxes is definitely what should've been done with this $140 million of cash, because that is how stimulus spending works. Actually Paterson should've just given it directly to landlords, probably.

[Photo: Getty]

It turns out that men have been hardest-hit by job losses in the last year, largely because they dominate the sectors where layoffs have been most widespread. So as the total number of available jobs has gone down, the share of remaining jobs held by women has increased:

[F]or the first time in American history women are coming close to representing the majority of the national work force. It would of course be a bittersweet milestone, given that it comes primarily as a result of men's layoffs.

Of course, women are still only getting 80 cents on the dollar, so it all evens out somehow. The Times has coined a word—"mancession"—to denote the dynamic. It's kind of like a manwich, but instead of robust, smoky beef flavor, it's chock full of depression, unemployment, an unshakable feeling of shame, and sisterhood.

Oh hell, we'll say it's good: A full $1.5 billion of that profit is going to AIG's primary owner, the federal government. So we can afford Cash for Clunkers after all! It's like Uncle Sam found a sawbuck in an old (red-white-and-blue) coat pocket.

But it won't last—AIG says business is still suffering from "weak economic conditions and the lingering effect of negative A.I.G. events earlier in the year." The "negative AIG events," you will recall, culminated in an orgy of outrage and threats of violence against the company after it redirected taxpayer dollars to the executives who engineered the financial collapse in the form of bonuses. So if AIG's apparent turnaround ends up being temporary, remember—it's your fault.

The new jobs report shows a faster-than-expected slowdown in the pace of job losses—247,000 were shed in July, when economists had expected 325,000—and an increase in hourly wages. So there is definitely good news to be had. But the New York Times' David Leonhardt points out that the topline number that is getting the most attention—the first decrease in unemployment since last April—is a statistical chimera hiding an actual increase in the total number of people without jobs:

The one thing that doesn't deserve much excitement is what will probably garner many of the headlines: the drop in the unemployment rate. It happened only because more people stopped looking for work and were thus ineligible to be counted as officially unemployed. The share of adults with jobs actually fell: to 59.4 percent, from 59.5 percent.

Those people who are conveniently "ineligible to be counted as officially unemployed" are also officially ineligible for unemployment benefits, which are beginning to run out across the nation as time runs out on the extensions included in the stimulus package. So we've managed to goose the employment numbers by cutting off benefits to people who don't have jobs and then denying that they exist. It's kind of like saying the cancer rate is dropping because once people die of cancer, they no longer count as having cancer.

Correction: So we got this totally wrong. The price listed above was the last sale price when Geithner bought the house. He bought it in 2004 for... $1,601,700. But this is the best part, that The Daily Show didn't mention: Geithner bought the house, at the height of the bubble, from Goldman Sachs Vice President Michael Millette.

Millette might have not put the house on the market when he sold it to Geithner, which would maybe explain why the 2004 sale price wasn't mentioned on the property report we saw.

Additionally, the day Geithner bought the house, he took out a $250k home equity line of credit.

After hosing Geithner, Millette bought a $1.3 million home in New Rochelle. Then he donated $2,300 to John McCain.

We were wrong, obviously, about all of this, and we apologize for accusing anyone of lying. Also we apologize for thinking Geithner was canny about real estate.

Original story:

According to John Oliver, Geithner bought this Westchester house for $1.6 million in 2004. Once he got the new gig in DC, he put it on the market, asking $1.635 million. So the joke is that he bought at the height of the (Fed-approved) bubble and is now, in this shitty marker, asking for even more money. Even the realtor, Ms. Debbie Meiliken, says he's asking way too much!

But! According to the public records, Geither and his wife bought the Larchmont, NY house in 1998. For $705,000.

So someone just made up the $1.6 million in 2004 thing. And Geithner is maybe not as clueless about this real estate thing as it seemed!

According to another Westchester real estate broker, who contacted us, Geither's renting out the house for $7,500 a month. So, you know, the house can stay on the market for a while, as he's making 9.7% on his initial investment. Or more!

Since he also holds a $515,000 mortgage on the property, he is likely netting much more than that, because the lending rate at the time was no greater than 5.5%. Assuming he took a 30 year mortgage, Mr. Geithner is now making 17.89% on his initial investment of $190,000. This does not include amortization.

So don't worry: you can totally trust Geithner to fix the housing crisis now. And if you're facing foreclosure, rent your house out and move to Washington.

Gladwell being Gladwell, he arrives at his conclusion using thousands of words, large portions of which are devoted to riffs on card games and British invasions of Turkish islands, among other things, but his main point is this:

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn't know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street's crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

Now, I read Gladwell's piece and do think that his argument has some merit. However, I have a fundamental disagreement with something, and it is this: I believe that the psychological roots of the Wall Street crisis, the same roots that Gladwell is saying were the driving force behind everything that went wrong, would not have existed if it were not for the massive cracks in the structural and cognitive foundation of the banking industry. In other words, the incompetence of regulators combined with the blissful ignorance of the players involved joined to create a perfect storm of ego-tripping. You follow?

Now, surely a strong argument can be made that if the human psyche weren't so Goddamned flawed, then the other factors wouldn't have affected it in the first place, thus all of the blame falls squarely at the feet of humanity's vast psychological faults, but then you're just getting into a great big "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" argument, and honestly it's 5:40 in the damn morning right now and I'm only confusing myself the more I write about this, so just go and read the thing yourself and make up your own damn mind, okay?!

Cocksure [New Yorker]