It "seems" that a bit of doubt seeped into an economy-related Associated Press report today. An hour later, it was gone.
An early report by Josh Boak with a 10:22 a.m. time stamp found at a subscribing outlet's site described job growth in the past 12 months as "seemingly robust." An hour later, in an expansion of that early report primarily covering today's government release on July retail sales, Boak, in collaboration with Anne D'Innocenzio, described it as "solid."
Here is the earlier version of Boak's employment-related paragraph:
What follows, along with a preceding paragraph I'll discuss later, is what it looked like at 11:26 a.m. at the AP's national site (the AP routinely sends earlier versions of reports at its national site down the memory hole when a revision appears):
The earlier qualified adjective ("seemingly robust") is the less inaccurate of the two. Job growth and the unemployment rate, the two primary indicators of job-market health, "seem" to be okay. But they're not, and people on both the left and the right who have their eyes open and are willing to acknowledge the realities of the Obama-era economy know that.
Yes, even on the left, as seen in the following statement by Democratic presidential candidate and declared socialist Bernie Sanders which the establishment press refuses to acknowledge even as it covers his insurgent campaign (HT Ed Driscoll at Instapundit; bolds are mine throughout this post):
BERNIE SANDERS TELLS RECORD CROWDS HOW BAD ECONOMY IS AFTER LAST 7 YEARS
Sanders also noted that millions of Americans are in desperate need of jobs as he said the unemployment numbers coming from the Obama administration aren’t to be trusted.
(Sanders said:) “Every month government comes out with a statistic on unemployment. Last statistic said that official unemployment was 5.3 percent but what they forgot to tell you is that statistic doesn’t include those people who have given up looking for work, those people who are working part time. Add it all together and real unemployment is over 10 percent.”
Symptomatic of what Sanders described is that fact that full-time employment has not returned to its prerecession peak almost eight years ago. Too bad his proposed fixes, like the doctor who recognizes the disease but won't prescribe the proper cure, would make matters worse.
As to the earlier paragraph about retail sales, your search for good news has to be a pretty desperate one if you're claiming that a retail sales increase which is only 0.3 points above hourly wage growth is a good sign. Healthy economies in the past have seen retail sales grow at a 4 percent to 5 percent annual clip —much better, even after considering inflation, than what we're currently seeing. Why? Because wage growth stinks, and the economy isn't healthy.
While it's nice that Boak and D'Innocenzio found "several economists" who now believe that second-quarter growth will be revised up to an annualized 3.0 percent, they were notably quiet about the third quarter. That's because it's not looking good.
The Federal Reserve of Atlanta which has almost exactly pegged initially reported results in the past two quarters, is currently predicting only one-fourth of that — and yes, it has incorporated today's retail sales data into its estimate (HT Zero Hedge):
The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2015 was 0.7 percent on August 13, down from 0.9 percent on August 6. ... Since a week ago, the nowcast for the contribution of inventory investment to third-quarter real GDP growth has declined from -1.8 percentage points to -2.2 percentage points. This decline more than offset an increase in the nowcast of the third-quarter growth rate in real consumer spending from 2.9 percent to 3.1 percent after the release of this morning’s retail sales report from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Additionally, though they expect it to increase by the time the quarter ends, the GDP forecasters at Moody's are currently carrying a 1.4 percent annualized prediction for the third quarter.
Average it all out, and it looks as if the economy is on track once again to turn in annual growth at or below the 2 percent average seen in the past three calendar years — part of the worst postrecession economic performance since World War II.
Naturally, Boak and D'Innocenzio didn't report that either.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
