Search Results for: clifton

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2015  The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve will release its statement today at 2 p.m. (ET). It is widely expected that the Fed will be holding rates steady. The Fed has been signaling for more than a year that the U.S. economy is strong enough for it to raise interest rates gradually. Based on comments from various Fed speakers, many had expected the rate hike to come in September. Wall Street on Parade has taken a skeptical view of the Fed’s happy talk about the economy – preferring to look at the cold, hard data coming from inside and outside the Fed. It now seems quite plausible that the Fed’s agenda all along has been to talk up the U.S. dollar to prevent capital flight while waving pom-poms to boost confidence and spur consumer spending. Corporate media seems … Continue reading →

By Pam and Russ Martens: August 10, 2015  Last Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report of 215,000 new jobs in July with its attendant announcement of an unemployment rate of 5.3 percent drew mostly yawns from the media. That wasn’t the case on February 3 of this year when Jim Clifton, CEO of the polling company, Gallup, wrote a stunning opinion piece on the company’s web site calling the U.S. unemployment rate “The Big Lie.” Clifton raised more media frenzy the next day when he appeared on CNBC and suggested he might “disappear” for questioning the government’s unemployment rate. Back then, the official unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. Today it’s 5.3 percent – a very healthy looking rate for an economy that is supposedly on the rebound. One of the bogus aspects raised by Clifton in his opinion piece about how the U.S. government calculates the unemployment rate was this: “Say you’re … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 16, 2015  Protesters were throwing fire bombs in the streets of Athens last evening over harsh new austerity measures being imposed on Greece, where banks and the stock market remain shuttered. One third of the stocks on the Chinese stock market remain suspended from trading in an effort to avert a crash. Bloomberg Business is reporting that institutional investors are holding the highest levels of cash since shortly after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. And just yesterday, America’s largest export market, Canada, slashed interest rates as its central bank announced its economy had contracted in the first two quarters of this year. The global landscape is beginning to look like the inevitable dystopian reality of a world ruled by the 1 percent. Against this backdrop, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, with her incessant chatter about raising interest rates before the year is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 28, 2015 If you’ve been scratching your head since the middle of last year as consumer confidence surveys depicted an optimistic, eager to spend consumer while other hard economic data was showing a sputtering economy, we’re here to put your mind to rest. You’re not crazy. The U.S. economy is dramatically diverging from where most consumers think it is and we have three charts to prove it. Most Americans have never heard of the Labor Force Participation Rate. Consumers judge the availability of jobs, or lack of them, by the Unemployment Rate that is fed to them in newspaper headlines and TV sound bites monthly. The Unemployment Rate has been coming down nicely and fueling positive vibes among consumers. Unfortunately, the Labor Force Participation Rate, which measures the number of people who are either employed or actively looking for a job has been … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 16, 2015 Since the depths of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, has been talking up a storm and moving markets. On multiple occasions, however, after Bullard has talked up tightening, he’s had to backtrack and urge easier monetary policy as the U.S. economy wilted back into subpar GDP growth. Yesterday, at a presentation to the annual Hyman P. Minsky “Conference on the State of the U.S. and World Economies,” Bullard made a case for the Fed raising interest rates sooner than the markets expect. Among the key points presented in his slide presentation were that “U.S. labor markets have been improving at a rapid pace over the last year,” and “U.S. GDP growth prospects remain relatively robust.” Dow Jones’ MarketWatch called Bullard “a leading hawk on the Federal Reserve” in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 26, 2015 Yesterday, economists at the Atlanta Fed’s Center for Quantitative Economic Research notched down their forecast for real GDP growth – the seasonally adjusted annual rate – to a tepid 0.2 percent for the first quarter of 2015. The revision from the earlier forecast of 0.3 percent followed yesterday’s durable goods report that showed a dramatic decline of 1.4 percent in February on a seasonally adjusted basis. Durable goods are products like refrigerators, washing machines or computers, items expected to last for at least three years. Because durable goods carry higher price tags than most other consumer outlays, a weakening in durable goods can be a warning of a tapped out or retrenching consumer. This first quarter forecast stands at odds with the Federal Reserve Board’s FOMC statement of March 18, 2015 which singled out “strong job gains” and rising household spending. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2015 Years of unending news stories on U.S. government programs of surveillance, rendition and torture have apparently chilled the speech of even top business executives in the United States. Yesterday, Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, an iconic U.S. company dating back to 1935, told CNBC that he was worried he might “suddenly disappear” and not make it home that evening if he disputed the accuracy of what the U.S. government is reporting as unemployed Americans. The CNBC interview came one day after Clifton had penned a gutsy opinion piece on Gallup’s web site, defiantly calling the government’s 5.6 percent unemployment figure “The Big Lie” in the article’s headline. His appearance on CNBC was apparently to walk back the “lie” part of the title and reframe the jobs data as just hopelessly deceptive. Clifton stated the following on CNBC: “I … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2015 Earlier this month, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, published a stunning indictment of Wall Street as a job creating engine. Clifton reported that the U.S. now ranks 12th among developed nations in business startups with countries such as Hungary and Italy having higher startup rates. Of equal concern writes Clifton, “American business deaths now outnumber business births.” Clifton has a theory on why America’s crisis in creating new businesses is a well-kept secret. He writes: “My hunch is that no one talks about the birth and death rates of American business because Wall Street and the White House, no matter which party occupies the latter, are two gigantic institutions of persuasion. The White House needs to keep you in the game because their political party needs your vote. Wall Street needs the stock market to boom, even if that … Continue reading →