Speaker 1: So I want to start today with one of the two big areas where there is a particularly
high amount of disinformation spreading right now.
Now, earlier in the week, we talked about one such area and that's covered in vaccines.
The I don't even know what to call it.
It's almost like they're calling it.
The launch seems weird.
It's almost like a product.
But the breakthrough of the Omicron variant into the news, which started on the day after
Thanksgiving last week and led to two very, very shaky days in the stock market.
That's one topic that has lent itself to significant disinformation, right wing media and Republicans
going crazy with false claims about the variant itself, false claims about COVID, false claims
about vaccines, et cetera, et cetera.
We covered that Monday.
We covered it to some extent yesterday, Tuesday.
The other area that is being victimized by disinformation from the right at this point
in time is the economy.
And by the economy that includes the supply chain stuff, employment, inflation and a few
other areas.
That's another area of significant disinformation with such esteemed talking points from the
right, as inflation is never going to end and it's going to destroy the economy.
Nobody wants to work anymore because of unemployment, and there's no workers and the job situation
is a disaster, et cetera, et cetera.
You guys have heard a lot of these talking points.
Oh, and also there's no Chinese made tchotchkes for Christmas on the shelves.
Thanks to Joe Biden.
OK, so those are the kind of general topics when we actually look at the economic data
that is generally accepted as signaling how the economy is doing now.
I'll get back to that because that's not a trivial matter.
There are measures we generally accept to tell us about the economy.
We could say these are the wrong measures, but we're going to get back to that.
When you look at those measures, things actually look OK.
A few new as we are now into December, a few new bullet points of data that were released
today.
Initial jobless claims, meaning new unemployment claims, fell to their lowest level last month,
November since November of 1969 on what's called the seasonally adjusted basis.
OK, that's the week before Thanksgiving.
Now, unadjusted numbers increased and this is an important thing to understand.
There were a hundred and 99000 new unemployment claims during the week ending November 20th,
the week before Thanksgiving.
Now, those have been what's called seasonally adjusted.
This is an accepted method for getting what we might call a truer number, which controls
for the layoff patterns that are expected based on the time of year that it is.
There are industries including retail, agriculture and others, which have seasonal patterns for
hiring and laying people off, and they don't really represent a true hire or layoff in
some sense.
So there's this process called adjustment now.
If you don't adjust the numbers, claims actually did go up a little bit by 18000 to almost
two hundred and fifty nine thousand that week before Thanksgiving.
But the general picture is that these are very low numbers for new unemployment claims.
So that's one side of the equation.
It actually looks pretty good.
The Labor Department actually expected many more people to apply for unemployment benefits
for the first time in that week.
Before Thanksgiving, they anticipated 70000 more.
It was actually only 18000 more, and that's a good thing by this metric.
OK, now there's a question as to whether, you know, I said the lowest in 52 years.
We have changed a number of things over that fifty two year period.
And so there's a legitimate question as to are we really comparing apples to apples when
we compare 2021 to 1969 or some period in between because there have been changes in
that interim period, for example, some states have made it harder to get unemployment, particularly
since the Great Recession of 2008 2009.
So that would reduce the number who even apply because they know it's harder to actually
get the benefits.
That's that that's fair.
That could be a factor.
On the other hand, since the start of the pandemic, more people are aware that such
benefits could be made available to them.
So that would be a factor that compared to the 70s and 80s, for example, makes more people
apply.
Generally speaking, you take a very top line look, new unemployment claims are very, very
low on an unadjusted basis, on an adjusted basis, dating back five decades.
That really pieces of six decades all the way back to 1969.
So it's one thing.
What about job creation?
On the other side of unemployment is job creation while private payrolls went up.
By five hundred and 34000 in November.
That's quite a bit better than the Dow Jones expectation of 500 and 6000 new jobs expected
was 506.
Actual was 534.
Leisure and hospitality soar again.
Companies with more than 500 employees saw a big gain.
Companies with over a thousand employees saw an even bigger proportional gain.
And so that's all pretty good by the standards that we use.
So the question marks now are what happens with Omicron and to what degree does that
impact the economy, at least in the U.S.?
And this is an economic statement I'm making, not a public health statement.
There does not seem to be much, if any, appetite for anything that would approximate a shut
down or a lockdown of any kind.
Now, whether it will make sense from a public health standpoint, first, we need to know
how serious Omicron is.
We still don't.
But that's a public health question dealing with this as an economic question.
It doesn't seem like there's really much appetite for that.
What happens with supply chain?
And are these even good metrics?
And that's something that is a different question.
You know, there are systemic problems with the economy that I talk about all the time
that I know many of you are aware of, which aren't part of this analysis.
When we look at new unemployment claims or job creation or whatever, we are talking about
wage growth, we're not talking about the reality that the minimum wage in most of the United
States is not a living wage as defined by.
Can you even get a basic two bedroom apartment in the place where you are employed at the
minimum wage?
Those are systemic problems that still exist, and there's no question that the metrics we
use fall woefully short.
That being said, the right accepts these metrics and so on their own terms.
It's very difficult to argue that we have a bad economy right now.
We haven't solved.
Not everybody has health care.
That doesn't change.
But by the standards the right accepts, things are actually looking OK.
And it's important to to understand that when you hear they're despairing talking points
on Fox News
and elsewhere.