Client Note: Good News, At Last*
By Matt McDonald, (202) 822-1205, mmcdonald@hamiltonps.com
To see the updated HPS cheat sheet, click here.
The jobs number today of 243,000 new jobs was great news, beating expectations, and bringing with it strong underlying data of increased hours worked, increased earnings and a drop in the average weeks of unemployment.
The asterisk to the report this month was a significant set of population revisions that happened over the past year, and concerns over people dropping out of the workforce. As we outlined in our white paper, the labor force participation rate has become a major concern during the recovery, and this month was no exception. The participation rate plummeted from 64 percent to 63.7 percent.
Demographic projections expect that participation rate to be at 65.3 percent. If that full participation rate is the goal, our economy is “missing” 3.8 million workers, up from the 3.4 million we noted in the white paper. The unemployment rate in that context has not budged at 10.4 percent.
Taking into account the population revisions of the…
Jobs Day Fact Sheet: January 2012
Here is the HPS Jobs Fact Sheet Release for January 2012.
For further analysis, Matt McDonald’s corresponding Client Note “Good News, At Last*” is available here.
Client Note: Occupy the Courtroom?
A look at the President’s new mortgage fraud task force
By Tucker Warren, (202) 822-1205, twarren@hamiltonps.com
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama announced the creation of the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, a new task force intended to, in the Presidents words, “expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis.” The President hopes this aggressive new effort will demonstrate a commitment to holding bankers accountable that will rally voters angry about Wall Street excess. Questions remain however, about what the working group can ultimately accomplish that the array of commissions and task forces previously created to address the financial crisis would not have otherwise.
Why It Was Created
The motivation for creating the working group is probably as strongly rooted in the political dynamics of an election year as it is in law enforcement objectives. President Obama has faced growing criticism from the political left who find his efforts to rein in Wall Street woefully lacking. A recent HPS/YouGov…