commentaries

Apparetnly GE, under Welch, knew it could alter the #'s to satisfy Welch's pronouncements. His Twitter essentially exposed a common business practice of GE-Jack .. and simply accused Obama of doing what Welch had done. Pity dumb ol Jack for thinking that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the primary tool of the Oval office.

Jack was the same guy who gamed his numbers five ways to Friday to insure "value added". What a jerk.

They needed a guy to go out and puke on the Democrats and Jack was the guy. Feed the parrots and keep moving; that's your conservative propaganda.

The Cons got very nervous when the new unemployement numbers came out because they were improved by 3 tenths of a percent. Cons will say or do almost anything to defeat Obama and certainly accusing him of corruption is as easy for them as falling off a log, and just about as stupid, especially the way Welch did it. Nobody with a functioning brain believes for a minute that the BLS fudged the numbers.

It's pretty well known that Welch directed GE's numbers to be cooked while he ran it. He's an example of an entitled executive who is so far down the rabbit hole he has no idea what is real or not, or of the difference between right and wrong. Unfortunately, he has plenty of company in his fantasy world where he is one of the Masters of the Universe.

Welch is on the right track. Many people don't really know how these jobs numbers are calculated. The numbers are arrived at in two ways: First, the straight-on count. How many new jobs have been created? How many people are looking for work? How many have just given up? The trends for these numbers are unmistakeable: new jobs created are declining month by month, and the number of new jobs created in 2012 so far is much less than those in 2011. All this goes to point to an actual unemployment rate over 14%, and if you count the part-timers (which the Administration now counts as "employed") the rate is over that. The second way numbers are arrived at is by a phone survey of a selected sampling. This time around it showed that the the 18-24 year-olds had a large jump in employment (which could easily be related to the administration now counting part-time workers as fully employed). The home survey for this time included large numbers of persons this age and came in at 7.8%. This is the number that the administration chose to hoist up on the flagpole. Even the persons running the phone survey will tell you it is flawed. But since when has that mattered? No amount of rosy smoke-blowing is going to convince Joe Lunchpail that is he employed when he isn't.

Mippy1, how incredibly shallow a comment. You assert the wild statement, it is widely know.... Can you site any source or quantify? Probably not. When Mr. Welch took over GE, it was an anemic and ineffective organization. He had the leadership skills necessary to turn the organization around with a key emphasis on people and leaders horizontally and vertically. Ultimately, the value of GE, its employees and other stakeholders increased many fold.

Any fair minded person should realize that this economy is far from one that should be celebrated. The unemployment rate is meaningless when you consider just how many people have left the labor force in the last 4 or 5 years... It is like a baseball player bragging about his batting average going up, not by collecting more hits but by erasing previous at bats.... That isn't an accomplishment in any real way.

We should focus on the inconsistencies between the household survey data and the establishment survey data. For example household survey data shows that the “total employment rose by 873,000 in September, following 3 months of little change”. While the establishment survey data shows that “employment increased by 114,000 in September”. Based on those two statements it would appear that the September numbers from the household survey displays a statistical anomaly…first because September’s numbers do not follow the previous trend (in the household & establishment surveys in the past few months as well as September’s establishment survey) and second the household survey numbers are very far out of line with the establishment survey data (7 times as many jobs created from one survey from the same month). Third, the month’s establishment survey data is a more statistically reliable survey since it polls a higher percentage of the total number of employers than the household survey polls households as a percentage of total households. Of course I could be wrong and the establishment survey data could show a drastic increase in employment next month. If what I suspect is correct though, we could see a large jump in unemployment once the next month’s household survey is released along with next month’s establishment survey data if the statistical anomaly of the September numbers are brought back in line with previous trends.

"No amount of rosy smoke-blowing is going to convince Joe Lunchpail that is he employed when he isn't."------Actually, no amount of doom and gloom from the Fox News zombies is going to convince people that they don't have a job when they do. Everyone I know that got laid off in 2008 & 2009 (and that's a lot of people, myself included) is back to work, some making more than before the crash. EVERY. ONE.