Investor’s Business Daily has the highlights:

• GE’s domestic workforce shrank by 25,000 — almost 16% — between 2001 and 2010, according to the company’s annual reports. (The number of overseas GE jobs climbed over those years.)

• AmEx employed 28% fewer workers in 2010 than it did a decade ago.

• Kodak’s workforce cratered to just 18,800 last year from 75,000 in 2001.

• Xerox’s employee base shrank by nearly a third between 2001 and 2009, before it acquired Affiliated Computer Services and its 74,000 workers in 2010.

• Even Intel has trimmed the number of workers it employs over the past decade.

What’s more interesting than who is on the President’s jobs council is who isn’t… There isn’t one representative of from America’s small and mid-sized businesses, who are responsible for creating two-thirds of the nation’s new jobs.

It’s pure symbolism over substance, that simply highlights the incestuous relationship between big business and government… It’s little surprise, and of little comfort, that council’s list of must-do, job-creating ideas includes the same tired old big government ideas that get trotted every time the economy slows: More money to retrain workers, more tax dollars retrofitting commercial buildings to boost energy efficiency and more government loans passed out by the Small Business Administration.

If the President was truly serious about job creation he’d do the simplest most effective thing available: Get government out of the way. Businesses in are drowning in sea of taxes, and regulation that are choking off job growth. The President’s Jobs Council did at least pay lips service to all the job-choking red tape by calling on the administration to streamline permitting processes.

But they mad no mention of much need reforms, like an immediate cut in corporate and capital gains taxes… The Wall Street Journal examined the need for corporate tax reform last December is story highlighting how the our ‘temporary’ tax code puts the nation in a lasting bind.

Related

• 1.9 Million Fewer Americans Have Jobs Today Than When Obama Signed Stimulus – CNSNews.com
• Don’t Look Now, But Stagflation May Be Here – Fox Business
• A Welfare State or a Start-Up Nation? – Allan Meltzer, Wall Street Journal
• US inflation rise ties Fed’s hands on further easing – Financial Times
• Lack of Retirement Funds Is Americans’ Biggest Financial Worry – Gallup
• Is Carter A Best Case Scenario? – W.R. Mead, The American Interest
• In Boeing Case, Machinists Are Picking the Wrong Fight – Bloomberg.com
• Federal Reserve Bank Presidents: Washington is Killing Business – Heritage Foundation

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was on Capitol Hill this week to answer critical questions about monetary policy, amid rising bond yields and sharply higher commodity prices. Mr. Bernanke showed no self-doubt, and Friday’s resignation of Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, one of the board’s inflation watchdogs, means that Mr. Bernanke’s easy-money inclinations will have even fewer internal checks.

Enter Charles Plosser, the president of Philadelphia’s Federal Reserve bank. A former dean of the William E. Simon School of Business at Rochester University, Mr. Plosser is widely known as an inflation hawk. And this year he has a vote on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets monetary policy. He’s now a man to watch.

One of the most perplexing questions for the Fed these days concerns the continuation of “QE2,” its second round of quantitative easing, which will dump $600 billion in new money into our banking system over the first half of this year.

Mr. Plosser doesn’t see a deflation risk for the U.S. economy right now. Even those who were worried about deflation six months ago, he says, have begun to change their tune. That means that, with moderate GDP growth and low inflation in the mix, the only thing left as an excuse for QE2 is high unemployment. Can lax monetary policy change that picture?

Mr. Plosser’s answer is unequivocal: This mess was caused by over-investment in housing, and bringing down unemployment will be a gradual process. “You can’t change the carpenter into a nurse easily, and you can’t change the mortgage broker into a computer expert in a manufacturing plant very easily. Eventually that stuff will sort itself out. People will be retrained and they’ll find jobs in other industries. But monetary policy can’t retrain people. Monetary policy can’t fix those problems.”

Mr. Plosser reminds me that when QE2 was first proposed last year, he wasn’t in favor. “I didn’t think it was necessary and I thought that the costs outweighed the benefits.” He says he thought that “it carried some very significant risks” that “would not be borne today but would be borne down the road when the time comes to unwind what we’ve been doing.”

But last month, when Mr. Plosser got his first chance to vote on the FOMC, he didn’t dissent. When I ask why, he launches into a summary of his four principles of good policy-making: “clear communication of objectives,” “credible commitments toward achieving those objectives,” “transparency” and “independence.”

I say disturbing because either Ms. O’Grady is deliberately trying to make Mr. Plosser look like he has no real idea what he and the Federal Reserve are doing… Or, Mr. Plosser really doesn’t know what he and the Fed are doing. I tend to think it’s the latter, I’ve followed Ms. O’Grady’s work for several years and always found her to be credible.

What’s clear from Mr. Plosser’s comments is that neither Federal Reserve or Federal Government are willing take their medicine,  instead they’re trying to micromanage the economy.

To put it bluntly the Federal Reserve knows a lot less than it pretends, and controls a lot less than it assumes. In short, they’re  just guessing… or more accurately they’re making a lot of assumptions often based on conflicting data. Worse still if they guess right and what they’ve done coincides short term with improvements in the economy, it falsely leads them to believe their actions have had a positive impact on the economy… which encourages them to do more and more micromanagement, until what they do doesn’t work anymore. Then they start flailing around looking for complex technical reasons, when simple commonsense would tell them they can’t micromanage the economy by monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve’s primary responsibility is to maintain a stable currency, what they’re done is destabilized and devalued the dollar. It’s time for the Fed to take their medicine, stop the printing presses and focus on re-establishing sound money policies and strong stable dollar. The rest of the economy will take care of itself.

Related

• IMF calls for dollar alternative – CNNMoney.com
• Betting Against Bernanke – The New York Sun
• France wants new global finance system – RTE News

As Scott Rasmussen noted in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

Voters today want hope and change every bit as much as in 2008. But most have come to recognize that if we have to rely on politicians for the change, there is no hope. At the same time, Americans instinctively understand that if we can unleash the collective wisdom and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people, there are no limits to what we can accomplish.

In this environment, it would be wise for all Republicans to remember that their team didn’t win, the other team lost. Heading into 2012, voters will remain ready to vote against the party in power unless they are given a reason not to do so.

Elected politicians also should leave their ideological baggage behind because voters don’t want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves.

Too many of our elected leaders have forgotten that they are our elected representatives, not our rulers. They have become an arrogant and condescending “aristocracy” that is openly contemptuous and dismissive of people they represent and the Constitution they swore to bear “true faith and allegiance to”.

Hope and Change will never come Washington, it comes from us… We the People. To quote Samual Adams “It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

We are that irate, tireless minority and it’s time to make ourselves heard… Get out and Vote!

The U.S. economy grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the third quarter as consumer spending climbed the most in almost four years, a sign the expansion is developing staying power.

The increase in gross domestic product matched the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and followed a 1.7 percent gain the prior three months, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington. Household purchases, about 70 percent of the economy, rose at a 2.6 percent pace, the best quarter of the recovery that began in June 2009.

The only real bright stop in the report was rise in consumer spending, which rose 2.6% in the quarter. The best gain in four years. The bad news is the economy is essentially stagnant…  2.0% growth in GDP isn’t enough to create jobs, and will likely to lead to more layoffs.

Anyway, if the trend continues and the GDP numbers are revised downward next month the blame will fall on President Obama, not the lame duck Congress.

It’s official: The Obama administration has now borrowed $3 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

It took from 1776, when the United States became an independent country, until 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall fell signaling victory in the Cold War, for the federal government to accumulate a total of $3 trillion in debt, according to the Treasury Department. It only took from Jan. 20, 2009, the day President Barack Obama was inaugurated, until Oct. 15, 2010, for the Obama administration to add $3 trillion to the federal debt.

The overall debt of the federal government, according to the Treasury Department, is now $13.666 trillion.

Republicans are far from blameless here; they’ve done more than their fair share of debt accumulation over the years. One things certain though, they’re pikers compared Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the Democrats who currently control Washington… these clowns have done in twenty months what it took previous Democrat and Republican administrations 214 years, from 1776 to 1990, to do.

At this rate Barack Obama is going to drive the car out of the ditch and right off a cliff!

H/T: Doug Powers.

Related

• How the Fed Is Holding Back Recovery – David Malpass, Wall Street Journal (Subscription Required)

I really can’t add anything here other than pointing you to a rather chilling analysis from Investor’s Business Daily: U.S. Won’t Recover Lost Jobs Until March 2020 At Current Pace.

This election is probably one of the most critical in history, if can’t break the Democrats hold on Congress we’re doomed to years of high unemployment, limited economic growth and diminished liberty.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. economy lost 95,000 nonfarm jobs in September as local and state governments shed positions at a faster rate than the private sector was adding, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The drop of 95,000 was much wider than the 8,000 decline expected by economists surveyed by MarketWatch, and the 57,000 jobs lost in August.

The nation’s unemployment rate remained steady at 9.6% as fewer new workers joined the labor market than in the previous month. Economists had expected a slight increase in the jobless rate.

Unemployment has now been above 9.5% for 14 straight months, as the Associated Press notes that’s the longest since the 1930s.

As a practical matter, with the mid-term elections just a month, this isn’t good news incumbent Democrats seeking re-election. They’re controlled Congress and the nation’s purse strings since January 2007 and what do have to show for it? I mean other than 14 months of 9.5% plus unemployment and a stagnant economy?

Related

• Gallup Finds U.S. Unemployment at 10.1% in September – Gallup
• Will election workers skew Friday job stats? – New York Post
• Job losses in 2009 likely bigger than thought – Reuters
• Dollar’s Fall Roils World – Wall Street Journal (Subscription Required)
• Greenspan Says U.S. Creating `Scary’ Deficit By Borrowing – Bloomberg

Click image for full size.

Bottom line; we’re not under taxed… The government spends to much!

H/T: James Pethokoukis.

Positive gross domestic product readings and other mildly hopeful signs are masking an ugly truth: The US economy is in a 1930s-style Depression, Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg said Tuesday.

Writing in his daily briefing to investors, Rosenberg said the Great Depression also had its high points, with a series of positive GDP reports and sharp stock market gains.

But then as now, those signs of recovery were unsustainable and only provided a false sense of stability, said Rosenberg.

Rosenberg calls current economic conditions “a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession,” and notes that any good news both during the initial 1929-33 recession and the one that began in 2008 triggered “euphoric response.”

“Such is human nature and nobody can be blamed for trying to be optimistic; however, in the money management business, we have a fiduciary responsibility to be as realistic as possible about the outlook for the economy and the market at all times,” he said.

Mr. Rosenberg’s argument it compelling, I’m not sure agree with him, but like I said I’m a pessimist on the economy. I’ve thought all along this so called recovery was more akin to a dead cat bounce than an actual meaningful sustained recovery… And that’s what the data seems to indicate. All the indicators I’m looking at, employment, housing, durable goods, and consumer confidence are pointing to anything but a recovery. Are we actually in a depression? I don’t know, but I think it’s safe to say this isn’t a garden variety recession.

Related

• Yes Folks, Hindenburg Omen Tripped Again – Wall Street Journal
• Asian markets continue retreat from risk – Financial Times
• U.S. deficit forecast masks true scope of problem – James Pethokoukis, Reuters
• Youth Unemployment Hits Record High – CNBC
• July New-home sales drop to record low 276,000 yearly rate – Market Watch
• Second Quarter GDP Growth Revised Downward – Wall Street Journal
• What Biden didn’t mention on stimulus – Associated Press
• The Most Fiscally Irresponsible Government in U.S. History – Mort Zuckerman, U.S. News
• Bad statistics for summer employment for youth – McClatchy

The number of new claims for unemployment benefits jumped unexpectedly last week as heavy snows caused layoffs to rise.

In addition, many state agencies in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions that process the claims were closed due to the storms and are now clearing out backlogs, a Labor Department analyst said.

The department said Thursday that first-time claims for unemployment insurance rose by 22,000 to a seasonally adjusted 496,000. Wall Street analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected a drop to 455,000.

Bad weather can cause job losses in construction and other industries sensitive to weather.

I’m sorry but I have to ask… Unexpectedly by whom???

JWF sums things up nicely:

It’s comical how every story about job losses always calls it unexpected, with pointy-headed experts baffled by the news. Maybe someone can ask Professor Obama about this grim news today during his six-hour lecture to Republicans.

Um, yeah, I’d pay money to see that!

Anyway, it’s not the weather that’s driving these new jobless claims it’s the slumping consumer confidence and  home prices coupled with the Millions of Americans who are underwater on their mortgages… roughly 300,000 of them are facing foreclosure each month. Americans simply don’t have the discretionary capital to invest or consume they they used to. Bottom line we’re not going to see anything resembling a meaningful recovery until that changes.

Related

• US Jan mass layoffs edge up on weak manufacturing – Reuters
• Read His Lips: Obama Calls for Increasing Payroll Taxes on ‘Households’ Earning Less Than $250,000 Per Year – CNSNews.com
• Obama May Prohibit Home-Loan Foreclosures Without HAMP Review – Bloomberg.com