Preliminary September labor force data counts for San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties pegs the unemployment rate at 9.7%, 8.4% and 9.1% respectively, unchanged in all three counties.
On a revised basis, the number of unemployed in San Francisco fell by 300 in September (from 44,400 to 44,100) as the number of employed fell by 400 (from 412,600 to 412,200) and the labor force contracted by 600 (from 456,900 to 456,300).
Overall unadjusted California unemployment fell by 0.2 percentage points to 12.2% as the labor force contracted by 26,300 workers and the ranks of the unemployed fell by 33,700.
∙ Monthly Labor Force Data for Counties: September 2010 (Preliminary) [EDD]
∙ San Francisco County Unemployment Holds At 9.7 Percent In August [SocketSite]
Unemployment hovering near 10%…but I voted for O’bama. He promised he’d fix everything…he did…he did.
I voted for change.
what a pisser
@Mark: The unemployment rate would be substantially different if McCain had won, right? Take your partisan crap elsewhere, idiot.
sg, you probably are too young to remember, but the Obama administration was promising all sorts of things, even to themselves:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/us/politics/09obama.html
Most of us have corrrectly moved on, including the administration’s economic advisors who crafted the above predictions!
It may have been better to get Palin out of the way in 2008 – as you suggest, it wouldn’t have been worse, and Obama could get more Senate experience before running in 2012 🙂
As for “partisan crap”, you have got to be kidding me. The best partisan stuff here is artfully disguised by hypocrisy, outright fabrication, data filtering and straw-man arguments. 🙂
poppycock…a prediction is a guess, subject to external forces not within one’s control and very often wrong. A prediction is not a promise. Obama has broken plenty of promises, in a damning way, and there is much to hold his feet to the fire for, but to suffer the delusion that the office of the president has the power to unilaterally tweak the unemployment knob in face of any systemic headwind suggests profound naivete.
Good point dub dub.
Ah the naive.
A few manias have come and gone and I was simply mocking the most recent.
The tech bubble…when housewives, neighbors, and mailmen became “day-traders” marked the near top of that bubble.
The recent real estate mania…the same players became house “flippers”. Ah another sign of the top.
And the O’bama mania. What a rock star 18 months ago. If you weren’t for him…you were anti-America.
Of course he and/or his administration can’t fix unemployment. I doubt there is much of anything he is capable of doing well…except passing out the kool-aid!
bubble burst…remove your bumper stickers.
although I am not, nor have I ever been, an Obama fan I have a few quick thoughts
1) in my OPINION (no way to prove it) I think that the unemployment numbers would have been worse with a Repub president than they were with O as President. Two reasons:
-first because there would have been stalemate between the Prez and Congress, so pushing through “stimulus” would have been that much harder. not saying that stimulus was worth the cost or not (I’ll leave that to others), but it definitely positively impacted unemployment
-second because McCain and Repubs would have went after “entitlement” programs more aggressively than Obama did. this IMO would create further unemployment
however our prez does not get a pass from me either, because he continues to put the Economy low on his list of priorities, below recurrently bailing out the banks and other special big connected interests.
those who howl that he’s a communist or socialist are not paying attention. Almost every action he does is for big-business. He is a corporatist. I can think of little he has done for the left… unless you count forcing people to buy private insurance a leftist principle…
therefore: we have two parties that are pro-big business. One is overtly so (repubs) and the other pretends to not be, but is also pro big-business (dems).
but as long as they can convince you that they are really different, then we can squabble amongst ourselves and ignore the fact that every day the corporations win out more and more. (unlimited election spending allowed as “free speech” by a corporation?)
“those who howl that he’s a communist or socialist are not paying attention. Almost every action he does is for big-business. He is a corporatist. I can think of little he has done for the left.”
This is why the whiners on Waaah Street are so ridiculous. Obama saved their asses when they were going bankrupt due to their own failed corporate policies and failed financial decisions, with the rest of us picking up the tab.
Now those guys have the nerve to complain that Obama is too anti-business. We’re being told by the same Waaah Streeters who got bailed out that Obama should have leave the free market alone. That would have been nice before when the banksters should have been given pink slips from bankrupt employers, instead of being given massive bonuses.
What a bunch of sore winners! Banksters should be worshiping Obama for enabling them to keep their jobs and their larger than life bonuses.
sfrenegade, there was a great This American Life episode a few weeks back — aptly titled “Crybabies” — that had a segment where correspondents talked to Wall Street traders about this. Their response was, generally, “well, of course the government had to bail us out; what, did you want the country to go into a Great Depression?,” thereby cabining that as a necessity and proceeding to whine about the possibility that hedge funds might have to pay more than 15% taxes on “their” profits.
Socialized loss, privatized profit, etc. But these guys actually phrased the whole thing in the language of risk/reward. “We’re taking the big risks, and we’re smarter than 99% of Americans, so we ought to make at least $10M a year, obviously.” It’s both hilarious and depressing to listen to.
Please read..”Atlas Shrugged”..Ayn Rand.
“We’re taking the big risks”
Yeah, and those who face the big risks are supposed to get either big failures or big successes. These bankster guys have rigged the system to make sure it’s the latter and then have the nerve to bitch about it. Depressing more than hilarious to me.
When a big business in another industry fails, we make them file bankruptcy and often change the management. When banksters fail, we let the same incompetents continue running the business and give them bonuses to boot. If Wall Street is really what makes this country run, shouldn’t we get the incompetents out of there?
“Please read..”Atlas Shrugged”..Ayn Rand.”
First, what is with all of these people saying to read Atlas Shrugged? Ayn Rand is at best a third-rate author who made a FICTIONAL story that doesn’t reflect reality and is not internally consistent.
Second, what does Atlas Shrugged have to do with anything? If you’re saying Obama is not pro-business enough, then why would he bail out business?
Last, do you really think Wall Street has the innovative geniuses that Rand was talking about? I don’t. Very few of Wall Street’s “innovations” actually produce anything. Rather, they are ways for rent-seekers to take a commission on pushing the same old money around. Innovation should produce something, and finance should stick to its boring task of providing the money so real innovators can innovate.
I am pretty sure that almost all of the CEOs of the major banks have turned over since 2008. It is not like it is that great a punishment, all of them are set for life.
But at least they lost their job, and as far as I can tell none of them have gotten a new job elsewhere. So that is something.
sfrenegade wrote:
Unfortunately, that novel and the others from the same author are a Libertarian and/or Objectivist touchstone. To show one example, here’s the opening ‘graph from a 2009 story from The Wall Street Journal:
You get the drift. It’s basically dogma that the ideas in that particularly awfully-written novel are correct. Here’s another article, from the New York Times, profiling the chairman of the banking company BB&T:
By the way, keep in mind that Ayn Rand’s most celebrated acolyte was none other than Alan Greenspan.
Frankly, I think it’d be a great thing if our current generation of self-aggrandizing plutocrats such as Jamie Dimon and John Thain, were to Go Galt because they’d find out in short order that they have a very, very high sense of self-worth that their beloved marketplace does not share, they’d be replaced without too much effort on their organization’s part, and the rest of us would be better off.
NoeValleyJim wrote:
I agree that all of them are set for life, but the astonishing thing is, you’re only correct for Bank of America (#1), Barclays Group US (#8), and HSBC North America Holdings (#10, and Brendan McDonagh was still CEO until July 31, 2020).
Looking at the rest of the top 10, in terms of dollar-valued holdings, descending:
• Citigroup: Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer since December, 2007
• JPMorgan Chase & Co.: Jamie Dimon, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman since January 2007
• Wells Fargo & Co.: John Stumpf, Chief Executive Officer since June 2007
• Goldman Sachs Group: Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman since May, 2006
• Morgan Stanley: John Mack, retired as Chief Executive Officer January, 2010 but still Chairman of the Board
• Metlife, Inc.: Rob Henrikson, Chief Executive Officer since March 1, 2006
• Taunus Corporation: John Ross, we don’t know, bank is a holding company for Deutsche Bank and private
NoeValleyJim wrote:
No. John Thain, who as chief executive officer Merrill Lynch & Co., spent $1.2 million redecorating his downtown Manhattan office as the company was firing employees landed a new gig as Chief Executive Officer of CIT in Feb. I’m sure if I looked at the next ten banks we’d find other similar situations. The plutocrats look out for each other.
Ugh, the above post should have noted that Brendan McDonagh was still CEO of HSBC North America until July 31 of this year, 2010. Time for Brahma to go to sleep. 🙂
Point is, most of these guys (seven or eight out of ten, depending on how strictly you count) did not lose their jobs, they are still in there, as if nothing special happened.
So the big turnover was in 2007 not 2008.
“So the big turnover was in 2007 not 2008.”
Yep, it was pretty much “wow, the sh*t is about to hit the fan, I better take my multi-million dollar exit package now and let someone else clean up this mess.”
NVJ is right that the ones that did “retire” already had huge pension packages (e.g. Ken Lewis at Bank of America), but very few have switched over since 2008 as Brahma said. 2007 was the big switchover for some of the banks, and I’d agree with Rillion that it was about leaving while you’re at the top. I would have cited Thain as the main example of someone who got a new job too. I assume Dick Fuld, late of Lehman, will get a new undeserved job eventually.
I think you’re right on Going Galt, Brahma. There are plenty of people to step into their place.
Has anyone seen the 60 minutes piece on unemployment in Silicon
Valley? Depressing……
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/21/60minutes/main6978943.shtml
sfrenegade brought up Lehman Brothers. That is in fact another great example of what he was decrying at the October 22, 2010 4:50 PM comment. A sizeable portion of the executive team, outside of Dick Fuld, is still employed running an offshoot called Lamco, even though the company is in bankruptcy.
Hank Greenberg, the former CEO of AIG, who was forced out well before the 2008 crisis in an accounting scandal, is starting a new insurance company called CV Starr. Presumably they won’t have a rogue division in London selling credit default swaps to all and sundry.
“Has anyone seen the 60 minutes piece on unemployment in Silicon
Valley? Depressing……”
Yes, depressing personal stories. But it ain’t quite as horrible as they make it out.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2010/10/22/unemployment-in-silicon-valley-steady.html
11.2% unemployment still sounds pretty depressing to me. And according to the “60 minutes” piece, it’s 22% in California for unemployed and underemployed (part-timers).