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The [...]

It was the same story as last month in the lead up to today’s release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report: A couple of weeks of mixed economic news. The report clocked in this morning with the jobless numbers well below the consensus predicted by experts surveyed by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal: a seasonally adjusted loss of 36,000 nonfarm jobs for February. The headline unemployment rate held steady at 9.7%. U6, the alternative measure that counts underemployed workers and a portion of those out of work Americans too discouraged to look for a job, rose to 16.8%.

^{Click for larger version of this now iconic Calculated Risk graphic}

Employment fell in construction, the information industry, transportation and warehousing. Temporary help services, health care and the retail trade added jobs. Severe winter weather may have affected the job statistics, leaving some workers uncounted, but quantifying exactly how many was not possible, the BLS stated. Economists at Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in St. Louis said the bad weather might reduce the payroll count by anywhere from 150,000 to 220,000 workers, according to Bloomberg. That undercount will probably be reversed this month, they said.

Revisions raised lowered the job losses in December from the 150,000 reported last month to 109,000 and boosted the job losses for January from 20,000 to 26,000.

The tally of officially unemployed rose slightly to nearly 14.9 million, with the U6 population of unemployed and underemployed still clocking in at nearly 26 million. The civilian labor force participation rate rose slightly to 64.8 percent in February. The employment-population ratio went from to 58.4 percent in January to 58.5% in February.

The  New York Times reported:

The economy is expected to add as many as 100,000 jobs a month later this year. But with businesses still skittish about hiring, and the end of stimulus programs in sight, economists are concerned that the labor market’s slow growth may hamper a recovery.

Those doubts have resurfaced in recent weeks in light of weak economic data. Consumer confidence has waned, and sales of homes have fallen rather sharply. Still, there are signs of a rebound: the manufacturing sector is improving, and businesses appear to be reinvesting in capital.

But without a vibrant jobs market, consumer spending will likely remain tepid, and businesses will continue to rein in costs.

If only 95,000 jobs are added each month in 2010, as the President’s Economic Report predicted last month, it would mean a reduction of only slightly more than a million of the 8.4 million jobs lost since the Great Recession began in December 2007. In other words, another oxymoronic “jobless recovery” like the ones that occurred in the two previous recessions.

Various other reports this week maintained a positive trend, including a strong gain year over year in retail sales, factory orders and the Institute for Supply Management’s non-manufacturing report. But retail sales are being compared with an especially weak 2009, and are still well below the same period in 2007. Factory orders rose but were below expectations, with a drop in orders for machinery and computers. And the employment index of the ISM report, though continuing its upward run, still indicates non-manufacturing jobs are being lost, just that the losses are far smaller than a year ago. And the negative news of the past two weeks continues to cast a shadow: weaker consumer confidence even as some people seem to be loosening their purse strings: and the drop in home sales. All in all, these reports add up to a who-can-tell kind of conclusion. Both optimists and pessimists have data to make their case, just as has been true since late last spring. One thing remains clear, however, anyone expecting a quick turnaround in the job market will continue to be gravely disappointed.

The BLS report also noted:

• Construction employment declined by another 64,000; manufacturing employment rose 11,000.

• Temporary hiring rose by 48,000.

• Hiring for the Census in January was 15,000.

• The average workweek for production and non-supervisory workers fell to 33.1 hours.

• The number of long-term jobless (27 weeks or longer) fell slightly to 6.1 million.

• • • • •

SilverOz has a diary on this subject here.

Economists: Another financial crisis on the way

Nonpartisan group led by Nobel winner calls for stronger financial reforms
The report warns that the country is now immersed in a “doomsday cycle” wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management – and when [...]

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Apples and oranges.

The “Colbert Report” continued its streak of Olympic coverage Tuesday night. Following an interview with two-time halfpipe gold medalist Shaun White, Colbert spoke with skiing sensation Lindsey Vonn.

The interview took place before Vonn’s cra…

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Via Jason Linkins at HuffPo, Michael Isikoff had a critical article this weekend, following the release of the OPR report.

A crucial CIA memo that has been cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials as justifying the effectiveness of waterboarding contained “plainly inaccurate information” that undermined its conclusions,  according to Justice Department investigators.

Cheney has publicly called for the release of the CIA’s still classified memo and another document, insisting their disclosure will bolster his claim that the rough interrogation tactics he vigorously pushed for while in the White House yielded actionable intelligence that foiled terrorist plots against the United States.

But a just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.

…One key claim in the agency memo was that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla. “Abu Zubaydah provided significant information on two operatives, Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed, who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area,” the CIA memo stated, according to the OPR report. “Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003 [sic].”

But as the Justice report points out, this was wrong. “In fact, Padilla was arrested in May 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs.” (The use of enhanced interrogations was not authorized until Aug. 1, 2002 and Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that month.) “ Yet Bradbury relied upon this plainly inaccurate information” in two OLC memos that contained direct citations from the CIA Effectiveness Memo about the interrogations of Zubaydah, the Justice report states.

Greg Sargent discusses this, too and ask a key question. There was wall-to-wall media coverage last spring of Cheney’s claims that these memos would show that torture worked. Will there be wall-to-wall media coverage of the fact that the memo was “plainly inaccurate” and that Cheney was, and is, full of shit?

Getting hotter for AGW hysterics.

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