i just received a call 10 min ago from Fidelity, my broker, TELLING me to cover my 4K short position by June 20, a position i've had since the Fall. i'm way up on the position. the reason they gave was "Reg SHO" thinking i wouldn't know what this was and that i'd just roll over and do what they said. i complained that i didn't want to take the huge profit especially when i think they're going to zero and i'd lose an extra $18K or so of profit if i'm right. also why were they picking on me as opposed to the other 45% of the stock shorts out there?
for those of you who don't know what Reg SHO is its the SEC regulation governing naked shorts and failure to delivers (FTD's). any stock that FTD over 13 days should be covered by the shorting brokerage house (Fidelity). IOW, they allowed me to unknowingly naked short the stock last Fall and they haven't been able (or should i say haven't bothered to) to locate real shares to bring in house since then. so why are they forcing me only now to cover?
i think they know that DSL is going to zero and that when the shit settles, the SEC will find out that more shares have been sold than exist. uh oh. which brokerages are allowing naked shorting? Fidelity for one.
Although the BLS is missing the job losses for illegal workers on the way down, they also didn't count them on the way up either.
CR,
Do we know this is true for a fact?
Is it possible that the BLS actually did count illegal workers (or made a rough guesstimate) on the way up, but are not counting them on the way down. Recall this is the same BLS that calculates the CPI with some rather "creative" metrics. They ignore price "volatility" for energy and food when it's in one direction: UP. They use owner's equivalent rent to smooth over large spikes in the cost of housing (such as occurred during the bubble). They use outright subsitution when those gimmicks aren't enough to keep the CPI in that 2-3% politically acceptable band.
Can we take anything published by the BLS at face value?
It is quite simple. Those who used to build homes (the only things counted as "residential construction" are now doing remodeling projects and repairs. The projects are smaller and less costly -the kind of work that contractors preferred to turn down during the boom.
In this area they have not switched to buidling commercial buildings. They are replacing roofs or remodeling a bathroom - the kind of work where the owner can pay cash.
HARM is right, you can't trust the BLS or the Dept of Labor,with facts being manipulated constantly by the Republicans. Elaine Chao is the Secretary of labor, and she is married to Mitch McConnell, Republican Senator from Kentucky, and minority leader in the Senate.
What percentage did BLS say construction employment increased on the way up? I assume that it matched the percentage gain in construction, but that is not clear from your comments.
Had dinner with some friends the other night and they have a second place in Charlotte County. They stated that RE sales are taking off again after a year and a half of nothing.
Does that jibe with what you see? Or is there a difference between the snowbird housing and the year-round stuff?
There are a few contractors who are regulars at a neighborhood cafe here - I've gotten to know them a little over the years.
They say they've reduced the number of employees somewhat, cutting out some dead wood, and are doing their best to provide the rest with several days of work each week. That's not always possible, however, and some crews have been given additional days off - or even a few weeks.
If there is a data set which reflects the time worked by hourly employees, it should show whether this is merely anecdotal or part of the larger picture.
In any event, construction continues here, though at a far more 'stately' pace than during the boom. Certainly it's not the case locally that half the construction crews are unemployed.
Might some of the apparent strength in construction employment also be an artifact of the birth death model?
I suspect much of the missing employment losses are among small contractors, many of whom likely folded their tents and took employment with stronger survivors. The BLS would pick up the continuing employer jobs, but the B/D model would also infer some jobs created at new firms (which, under current circumstances, may not actually exist).
Point taken, but let's not forget that use of hedonics and subsitution really took off under the Clinton administration. I'm not letting anyone off the hook here, but political manipulation of statistics is hardly confined to one particular party.
No offense, but I've seen this posted nearly a dozen times and I still don't understand it. What factual bases support the two reasons provided as opposed to the BLS f-ing up or something entirely different?
CR Writes: Although the BLS is missing the job losses for illegal workers on the way down, they also didn't count them on the way up either.
This is explanation is flawed. If illegal workers aren't counted at all, we can make lots of different assumptions about growth and fall over time. It's easy to get the worker line in the chart to "match" the starts/completion lines.
All you need is for illegals to have grown more than legals in the runup to 2006, and then illegals to have declined more than legals in the fall to 2008. Additionally, the % fall in illegals from 2006 to 2008 would have to be quite a bit greater than the % increase in illegals from 2001 to 2006. Given that illegals are likely more marginal employees, this wouldn't be an unlikely pattern.
Consider the following example which borrows data from the charts where possible:
Hey, CR- are you guys ignoring Tangelogate? True, it's all over the blogosphere, but we're on the verge of an enormous housing bill and you guys haven't even sniffed at the link to the legislative scandal of the month. Well, okay, the week. Er, at least the day. The hour?....
"Does that jibe with what you see? Or is there a difference between the snowbird housing and the year-round stuff?
Just curious.
Thanks"
homedad43 | Homepage | 06.17.08 -
Define taking off. A lot of foreign buyers. A lot of people catching falling knives. It looks like between 600-700 sales according to the records. That is actually pretty good. The problem is going to be the upcoming option arm stuff. Everything in trouble so far has been in the 100-300k range. The high priced stuff is about to hit. This fall with the snowbirds will tell the tale.
Oh,since rainy season started the number of visible homes with tall grass has gotten pretty insane. The banks are still trying to process a shit ton of empty homes...
Chris
P.S. - I firmly believe it is mainly knife catchers...
To the extent these are hourly employees that only get paid when there is actual work (and few/no benefits), then there is little incentive to officially take them off the 'payroll'. My company has a number of employees and contractors like that - we utilize them only when we have work, but they all claim employment.
Are these household survey or payroll data numbers?
Many construction workers (domestic and foreign) are paid in cash and not reported to the IRS or any other agency. If these workers are not counted in either the boom or the bust then employeement would tend to appear more stable than reality.
I think that CRE construction slump might be more sever than I had originally thought. The cost of steel, copper, and concrete is still running up and up....
Its brutal the cost increases in a declining market. Fewer and fewer buildings are going to pencil with the shrinking dollar....
Benny boy is going for broke!
(Actually I appreciate his latest rhetoric about fighting inflation from abroad.)
The Economist is such a permabear publication that the cluetrain could leave the platform before they even get on.
Granted, they've been right for the past few years, and it is a useful counterpoint to the cheerleaders at CNBC , etc., but I can't think of much data that the Economist thinks doesn't foretell doom.
Yea, Banco De Mexico has the remittance data back online. The thumbsnap link has a plot of the total US$ sent back to Mexico. We in uncharted territory in that YoY remittances are declining since mid 2007. The second link is to the source data. Selection #2 is the monthly data.
"it doesn't seem to explain why the BLS employment numbers haven't fallen more. Although the BLS is missing the job losses for illegal workers on the way down, they also didn't count them on the way up either."
But it can explain why the BLS numbers haven't fallen more. If illegal workers are making up a large percentage of the people being laid off then we would expect to see a large drop in output (housing starts/completions) and a minor drop in employment. One might be able to discern this effect from the data by looking at worker productivity. If illegals have been building houses and were not counted I would expect this to show up as higher productivity for those workers being counted. And the subsequent decline in illegal employment would cause productivity to fall back down.
I'm surprised that CR slipped up on this one here. If employment grew at the same rate for legals and illegals before the bust, but fell at a higher rate for illegals after the bust, you could easily get the exact curve you have.
We went to Home Depot (Boulder suburbs) on Saturday afternoon to get a cabinet. It was deserted. There were more sales people than customers - people kept trying to help us! On a Saturday afternoon. Maybe it was a weird coincidence, but I sure wouldn't be buying Home Depot stock right now.
A few weeks before I went to Lowe's to get garden plants, and it was hopping. But I was only in the garden section, so I don't know if the main part was busy or not.
Emma Anne,
I think Saturday afternnon what the smoke out at the Hippie Festival in Boulder, so that could explain it. The funny thing is all the food places were buzzing.
Elvis - aha! It was sure weird in it's echoing emptiness there. I take we are neighbors? Too bad there is no culture or sushi and it is so humid here, huh?
The Economist called the RE bust one year early (I remember the magazine cover showed a falling cartoon brick), but also predicted both president Gore and president Kerry.
With MS Excel, I played with models like earlier poster 'get sum' suggested. If you assume the illegal floor spiked in 2004/2005, it works somewhat.
A crude check step is to compare a few public builder financial statements 1995-2008.
While the price/finance bubble will distory measurements inviolving operating income, the extent to which labor is shifted from citizen to illegal should show up in the relationship between property plant and equipment and cost of revenue.
A possible explanation is that the 'employees' we see represented by the 'curve' are supervisors, foremen, and managers. The laborers and craftsmen don't appear as an overlay because they were never on the books - on the uptrend or the downtrend. Is what's being measured only those supervisors, foremen, and managers whose tenure might be more persistent in the downtrend?
I think earlier Wally hit the problem with the graph on the head.
6 months ago there were about 3 million workers building about 1600 houses per month.
Today there are about 3 million workers building about 1000 houses per month.
As a long term subscriber I feel compelled to come to the defense of the Economist. IMO the newspaper is very careful to keep opinions out of it's reporting and is the classic two-handed economist - on the one hand and then on the other hand. After about 20 years I cannot ascribe a bullish or bearish bias. Perhaps the world has a negative bias and careful reporting passes this along automatically.
For the record, the Economist (in it's Op-Ed pages) supported Bush in 2000 but Kerry in 2004 saying Bush's first term performance did not warrent a second term. Any "predictions" would have been reporting of polls.
My personal opinion is that there is no better single source of information.
Warning: I'm not familiar with how BLS calculates their figures, so this may not be at all useful.
Here on Colorado's front range, the number construction tradespeople classified as employees is rapidly approaching zero. In the absence of any will whatsoever on the part of the IRS to enforce the regulations regarding who is and is not a subcontractor, most construction companies have shed their employees and hired non-independent "contractors" to perform the bulk of their work. These men and women are contractors in name only; they're told when and where to show up for work, they're paid hourly, they provide no materials, they work for only one prime contractor. And when the work dries up, they're not eligible for unemployment benefits.
Another dirty little secret of the construction industry is the lengths contractors will go to to avoid unemployment claims. Some of the ploys are obvious; pay cuts, demotions, and degrading work assignments intended to make weaker employees quit. Others are designed to retain employees through slow times, like arranging under the table "side work" for an employee in lieu of a layoff.
Finally, many of those undocumented workers probably were counted on the way up, yet not on the way down. They no doubt supplied a SSN to get hired, but knowing it was bogus, they didn't apply for unemployment benefits when they lost their job.
If you think HD is slow go to Sears. I dropped by last night to get a price on a small electric drill, I was the ONLY person in that entire section of the store. This included garden tools, lawn mowers, paint, you name it. The parking lot was empty as well. At 7pm. I don't see how Sears stays in business, I've noticed this several times in the past year.
Here in the city of Portland, OR the city government has set up a gov't sponsored day laborer gathering site so that contractors can find them more easily. Forget the 7-11...now the illegals gather where the city points them to.
Not building as many homes in Orange
County, Ca. now.
Lots of condo projects. Hey, houses are too expensive, lets build condo's.
Oh, wait no one is buying condo's -
lets call them luxury apartments.
Economist -- solid on nearly any subject, except
(a) France -- the old cross-channel rivalry lives on
(b) Iraq/Terrorism -- they bought the neo-con line and never wavered. Just like they didn't give up on Vietnam until the last chopper left the compound.
Hell, I was laid off twice in this downturn, both times by residential developers. One had the foresight to pull out of the market and the other went completely broke. 75% of my friends are in land acquisition and most are looking for work. There is no stability, but some employers are taking it on the chin to be good to their people. I just wasn't working for one.
Seattle Pubsec echoing NC Jim and Detroit Dan's praise for the Economist. One hears a lot these days about "the death of print," etc. but this mag bucks all trends, subscriber base in North America up 110% since 2000. Now that's the market at work.
sorry CR. completely OT:
i just received a call 10 min ago from Fidelity, my broker, TELLING me to cover my 4K short position by June 20, a position i've had since the Fall. i'm way up on the position. the reason they gave was "Reg SHO" thinking i wouldn't know what this was and that i'd just roll over and do what they said. i complained that i didn't want to take the huge profit especially when i think they're going to zero and i'd lose an extra $18K or so of profit if i'm right. also why were they picking on me as opposed to the other 45% of the stock shorts out there?
for those of you who don't know what Reg SHO is its the SEC regulation governing naked shorts and failure to delivers (FTD's). any stock that FTD over 13 days should be covered by the shorting brokerage house (Fidelity). IOW, they allowed me to unknowingly naked short the stock last Fall and they haven't been able (or should i say haven't bothered to) to locate real shares to bring in house since then. so why are they forcing me only now to cover?
i think they know that DSL is going to zero and that when the shit settles, the SEC will find out that more shares have been sold than exist. uh oh. which brokerages are allowing naked shorting? Fidelity for one.
Easy to explain. The BLS only counts each Mexican as 3/5 of a person.
And to think that Bush's "jobless recovery" was such a mystery.
Although the BLS is missing the job losses for illegal workers on the way down, they also didn't count them on the way up either.
CR,
Do we know this is true for a fact?
Is it possible that the BLS actually did count illegal workers (or made a rough guesstimate) on the way up, but are not counting them on the way down. Recall this is the same BLS that calculates the CPI with some rather "creative" metrics. They ignore price "volatility" for energy and food when it's in one direction: UP. They use owner's equivalent rent to smooth over large spikes in the cost of housing (such as occurred during the bubble). They use outright subsitution when those gimmicks aren't enough to keep the CPI in that 2-3% politically acceptable band.
Can we take anything published by the BLS at face value?
OT: Talking about RE all the time is nice, but how about writing an article about the ridiculous 1.4% PPI?
It is quite simple. Those who used to build homes (the only things counted as "residential construction" are now doing remodeling projects and repairs. The projects are smaller and less costly -the kind of work that contractors preferred to turn down during the boom.
In this area they have not switched to buidling commercial buildings. They are replacing roofs or remodeling a bathroom - the kind of work where the owner can pay cash.
HARM is right, you can't trust the BLS or the Dept of Labor,with facts being manipulated constantly by the Republicans. Elaine Chao is the Secretary of labor, and she is married to Mitch McConnell, Republican Senator from Kentucky, and minority leader in the Senate.
What percentage did BLS say construction employment increased on the way up? I assume that it matched the percentage gain in construction, but that is not clear from your comments.
Boooyaaaahahahahaha
strap on , rocket ride..2pm!
O/T to Cobradriver:
Had dinner with some friends the other night and they have a second place in Charlotte County. They stated that RE sales are taking off again after a year and a half of nothing.
Does that jibe with what you see? Or is there a difference between the snowbird housing and the year-round stuff?
Just curious.
Thanks
Only BS comes out of the BLS.
There are a few contractors who are regulars at a neighborhood cafe here - I've gotten to know them a little over the years.
They say they've reduced the number of employees somewhat, cutting out some dead wood, and are doing their best to provide the rest with several days of work each week. That's not always possible, however, and some crews have been given additional days off - or even a few weeks.
If there is a data set which reflects the time worked by hourly employees, it should show whether this is merely anecdotal or part of the larger picture.
In any event, construction continues here, though at a far more 'stately' pace than during the boom. Certainly it's not the case locally that half the construction crews are unemployed.
Might some of the apparent strength in construction employment also be an artifact of the birth death model?
I suspect much of the missing employment losses are among small contractors, many of whom likely folded their tents and took employment with stronger survivors. The BLS would pick up the continuing employer jobs, but the B/D model would also infer some jobs created at new firms (which, under current circumstances, may not actually exist).
Dickeylee,
Point taken, but let's not forget that use of hedonics and subsitution really took off under the Clinton administration. I'm not letting anyone off the hook here, but political manipulation of statistics is hardly confined to one particular party.
No offense, but I've seen this posted nearly a dozen times and I still don't understand it. What factual bases support the two reasons provided as opposed to the BLS f-ing up or something entirely different?
The chart seems to show that about 1.3 million people are being employed by homebuilders to do nothing. I find that highly unlikely to be true.
CR Writes: Although the BLS is missing the job losses for illegal workers on the way down, they also didn't count them on the way up either.
This is explanation is flawed. If illegal workers aren't counted at all, we can make lots of different assumptions about growth and fall over time. It's easy to get the worker line in the chart to "match" the starts/completion lines.
All you need is for illegals to have grown more than legals in the runup to 2006, and then illegals to have declined more than legals in the fall to 2008. Additionally, the % fall in illegals from 2006 to 2008 would have to be quite a bit greater than the % increase in illegals from 2001 to 2006. Given that illegals are likely more marginal employees, this wouldn't be an unlikely pattern.
Consider the following example which borrows data from the charts where possible:
year\t 2001\t2006\t2008
starts\t 1400\t2100\t1300
counted workers\t2600\t3400\t3100
illegal workers\t1250\t2400\t500
total workers\t3850\t5800\t3600
counted/start\t1.9\t1.6\t2.4
total/start\t2.8\t2.8\t2.8
(sorry, OT)
Hey, CR- are you guys ignoring Tangelogate? True, it's all over the blogosphere, but we're on the verge of an enormous housing bill and you guys haven't even sniffed at the link to the legislative scandal of the month. Well, okay, the week. Er, at least the day. The hour?....
"Does that jibe with what you see? Or is there a difference between the snowbird housing and the year-round stuff?
Just curious.
Thanks"
homedad43 | Homepage | 06.17.08 -
Define taking off. A lot of foreign buyers. A lot of people catching falling knives. It looks like between 600-700 sales according to the records. That is actually pretty good. The problem is going to be the upcoming option arm stuff. Everything in trouble so far has been in the 100-300k range. The high priced stuff is about to hit. This fall with the snowbirds will tell the tale.
Oh,since rainy season started the number of visible homes with tall grass has gotten pretty insane. The banks are still trying to process a shit ton of empty homes...
Chris
P.S. - I firmly believe it is mainly knife catchers...
I think they are stated income employment numbers.
CR, I would not burn any more brain cells or spill any more ink on this.
You were right that non-residential RE would fall, following residential's fall. Please, take a bow.
Your contention that residential construction employment would fall, following residential construction's fall, is eminently reasonable.
But, the labor statistics are odd. CES reports gains in employment through Dec. '07 while BED reports employment falling beginning in Q3 '07.
I would just accept the disconnect, state that it makes no sense, and wait for the real explanation to come out from BLS in three-to-five years.
To the extent these are hourly employees that only get paid when there is actual work (and few/no benefits), then there is little incentive to officially take them off the 'payroll'. My company has a number of employees and contractors like that - we utilize them only when we have work, but they all claim employment.
CR,
Are these household survey or payroll data numbers?
Many construction workers (domestic and foreign) are paid in cash and not reported to the IRS or any other agency. If these workers are not counted in either the boom or the bust then employeement would tend to appear more stable than reality.
Jim
"employment" I meant if I could spell.
Jim
Of topic - Ip is leaving the WSJ to take over the US economic beat at the Economist. Now, maybe the Economist can get a clue.
Regarding whether illegals were counted at the beginning or not.
I don't think it matters. Many have pointed out that if they weren't counted on the way up then it wouldn't matter on the way down...
Well if thats true then the whole curve would be shifted up right before the inflection point. and the shape after would be the same.
My point being CRs curve can model is still plausible...
idoc,
I'm glad i left them a few years ago. (Not that i know scottrade is any better)
Most interesting story...
Point taken, but let's not forget that use of hedonics and subsitution really took off under the Clinton administration
HARM, wasn't it that charlatan Michael Boskin under the elder Bush who introduced the hedonics and substitution adjustments?
Ok last post for a while:
I think that CRE construction slump might be more sever than I had originally thought. The cost of steel, copper, and concrete is still running up and up....
Its brutal the cost increases in a declining market. Fewer and fewer buildings are going to pencil with the shrinking dollar....
Benny boy is going for broke!
(Actually I appreciate his latest rhetoric about fighting inflation from abroad.)
k harris,
The Economist is such a permabear publication that the cluetrain could leave the platform before they even get on.
Granted, they've been right for the past few years, and it is a useful counterpoint to the cheerleaders at CNBC , etc., but I can't think of much data that the Economist thinks doesn't foretell doom.
Yea, Banco De Mexico has the remittance data back online. The thumbsnap link has a plot of the total US$ sent back to Mexico. We in uncharted territory in that YoY remittances are declining since mid 2007. The second link is to the source data. Selection #2 is the monthly data.
http://thumbsnap.com/v/7HGRQ5Wz.jpg
General Search
Best,
"it doesn't seem to explain why the BLS employment numbers haven't fallen more. Although the BLS is missing the job losses for illegal workers on the way down, they also didn't count them on the way up either."
But it can explain why the BLS numbers haven't fallen more. If illegal workers are making up a large percentage of the people being laid off then we would expect to see a large drop in output (housing starts/completions) and a minor drop in employment. One might be able to discern this effect from the data by looking at worker productivity. If illegals have been building houses and were not counted I would expect this to show up as higher productivity for those workers being counted. And the subsequent decline in illegal employment would cause productivity to fall back down.
FatalException writes:
(sorry, OT)
Hey, CR- are you guys ignoring Tangelogate?
FatalException |
Re-read the UberNerd archives. Those missing points are a non-story.
get sum is right:
I'm surprised that CR slipped up on this one here. If employment grew at the same rate for legals and illegals before the bust, but fell at a higher rate for illegals after the bust, you could easily get the exact curve you have.
Meant to mention the obvious that I think that Mexican remittances are a proxy for illegal immigrants and hence the posting.
Best,
"illegal immigrants" supposed to be illegal immigrant employment.
sheesh
Anecdotes:
We went to Home Depot (Boulder suburbs) on Saturday afternoon to get a cabinet. It was deserted. There were more sales people than customers - people kept trying to help us! On a Saturday afternoon. Maybe it was a weird coincidence, but I sure wouldn't be buying Home Depot stock right now.
A few weeks before I went to Lowe's to get garden plants, and it was hopping. But I was only in the garden section, so I don't know if the main part was busy or not.
Emma Anne,
I think Saturday afternnon what the smoke out at the Hippie Festival in Boulder, so that could explain it. The funny thing is all the food places were buzzing.
The second jg is not the 'original' right-wing nutjob jg.
Elvis - aha! It was sure weird in it's echoing emptiness there. I take we are neighbors? Too bad there is no culture or sushi and it is so humid here, huh?
BED survey has construction as losing 211k jobs from Q306 thru Q307, with only Q107 being positive(Q307 is when the wheels fell off @ 107k lost.)
If this is the case than the peak on your chart is more a flat top.
What would the construction chart look like without the B/D or using the household data?
The Economist called the RE bust one year early (I remember the magazine cover showed a falling cartoon brick), but also predicted both president Gore and president Kerry.
With MS Excel, I played with models like earlier poster 'get sum' suggested. If you assume the illegal floor spiked in 2004/2005, it works somewhat.
A crude check step is to compare a few public builder financial statements 1995-2008.
While the price/finance bubble will distory measurements inviolving operating income, the extent to which labor is shifted from citizen to illegal should show up in the relationship between property plant and equipment and cost of revenue.
A possible explanation is that the 'employees' we see represented by the 'curve' are supervisors, foremen, and managers. The laborers and craftsmen don't appear as an overlay because they were never on the books - on the uptrend or the downtrend. Is what's being measured only those supervisors, foremen, and managers whose tenure might be more persistent in the downtrend?
I think earlier Wally hit the problem with the graph on the head.
6 months ago there were about 3 million workers building about 1600 houses per month.
Today there are about 3 million workers building about 1000 houses per month.
Doesn't that stick out like a sore thumb?
As a long term subscriber I feel compelled to come to the defense of the Economist. IMO the newspaper is very careful to keep opinions out of it's reporting and is the classic two-handed economist - on the one hand and then on the other hand. After about 20 years I cannot ascribe a bullish or bearish bias. Perhaps the world has a negative bias and careful reporting passes this along automatically.
For the record, the Economist (in it's Op-Ed pages) supported Bush in 2000 but Kerry in 2004 saying Bush's first term performance did not warrent a second term. Any "predictions" would have been reporting of polls.
My personal opinion is that there is no better single source of information.
Jim
NC Jim,
I agree with your comments on the Economist.
Thanks...
Warning: I'm not familiar with how BLS calculates their figures, so this may not be at all useful.
Here on Colorado's front range, the number construction tradespeople classified as employees is rapidly approaching zero. In the absence of any will whatsoever on the part of the IRS to enforce the regulations regarding who is and is not a subcontractor, most construction companies have shed their employees and hired non-independent "contractors" to perform the bulk of their work. These men and women are contractors in name only; they're told when and where to show up for work, they're paid hourly, they provide no materials, they work for only one prime contractor. And when the work dries up, they're not eligible for unemployment benefits.
Another dirty little secret of the construction industry is the lengths contractors will go to to avoid unemployment claims. Some of the ploys are obvious; pay cuts, demotions, and degrading work assignments intended to make weaker employees quit. Others are designed to retain employees through slow times, like arranging under the table "side work" for an employee in lieu of a layoff.
Finally, many of those undocumented workers probably were counted on the way up, yet not on the way down. They no doubt supplied a SSN to get hired, but knowing it was bogus, they didn't apply for unemployment benefits when they lost their job.
My personal opinion is that there is no better single source of information.
Jim
I think you are forgetting about Sebastian and "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."
Emma Anne,
If you think HD is slow go to Sears. I dropped by last night to get a price on a small electric drill, I was the ONLY person in that entire section of the store. This included garden tools, lawn mowers, paint, you name it. The parking lot was empty as well. At 7pm. I don't see how Sears stays in business, I've noticed this several times in the past year.
Emma Ann writes: "We went to Home Depot (Boulder suburbs) on Saturday afternoon to get a cabinet. It was deserted."
My nephew just got laid off from the Portland (Oregon) area HD. Lack of customers.
Here in the city of Portland, OR the city government has set up a gov't sponsored day laborer gathering site so that contractors can find them more easily. Forget the 7-11...now the illegals gather where the city points them to.
7-11 is to awesomeness like water is to life. Neither awesomeness nor life would exist without 7-11 and water respectively.
Not building as many homes in Orange
County, Ca. now.
Lots of condo projects. Hey, houses are too expensive, lets build condo's.
Oh, wait no one is buying condo's -
lets call them luxury apartments.
Lots of building going on by Angel Stadium.
Economist -- solid on nearly any subject, except
(a) France -- the old cross-channel rivalry lives on
(b) Iraq/Terrorism -- they bought the neo-con line and never wavered. Just like they didn't give up on Vietnam until the last chopper left the compound.
Hell, I was laid off twice in this downturn, both times by residential developers. One had the foresight to pull out of the market and the other went completely broke. 75% of my friends are in land acquisition and most are looking for work. There is no stability, but some employers are taking it on the chin to be good to their people. I just wasn't working for one.
Seattle Pubsec echoing NC Jim and Detroit Dan's praise for the Economist. One hears a lot these days about "the death of print," etc. but this mag bucks all trends, subscriber base in North America up 110% since 2000. Now that's the market at work.
Talking Biz News » Economist passes 700,000 subscribers in North America
How about option #3, that this and other data is largely contrived or based on totally faulty modeling?