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Lael: I do not have a link but I don't think there is much doubt that during the year last year, bls announced they would no longer accumulate or publish the number. However that turns out not to be the end of the story. In fact, there is also no doubt that you no longer can read these statistics in the Wall Street Journal or elsewhere and following the announcement, the cummulative number that was published disappeared from the rest of the financial press also. But, following my post, I received a private mail from Starwind who is one of the best people on the site at tracking financial data who confirms my story but also advises me that the facts do not meet the Dept of Labor prouncment--in fact you can still find the numbers at: http://www.bls.gov/mls/

Go figure. Still interesting because the financial press stopped reporting this number--why did they do that. I had not heard the story about the Challenger, Grey guy.

As litany points out in #13, the origination of the data was a liberal bill intended to make it more difficult for companies to lay off large numbers of employees in plant closings without jumping through several hoops, one of which was filing of the notice with Dept of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics then accumulated the notice data and published it and it is that publication that Dept of Labor stopped because it did not want to paint a bad employment picture.

With respect to the balance of litany's #13 post, I respectfully disagree. 50 is a small number--the layoff notice is important and the cummulative layoffs, period to period are one of the meaningful numbers in assessing the employment picture. That is why Labor stopped publishing.

The new claims data is not very meaningful because a large part of the employable are not employed and have been unemployed so long that benefits have run out and they are not eligible to file again. The total unemployed data is not meaningful either--the numbers for that release are obtained by telephone survey completely under the control of the reporting agency.

In fact, the Metzenbaum Act filings are one of the few pieces of hard data that provide real information about the state of the economy. Another is state and local tax receipts--that data is not accumulated by any formal process either but you can get it on your own by looking at state treasurer sites and local government sites; the other piece of meaningful data is federal tax receipts. All this information, properly tabulated paints a less than positive picture of the current state of the economy.

Again, not in any way the fault of Bush. The economy started to contract in the fourth quarter of 1999, a year before the election. In my view the contraction was generated by monetary policy (the fed). In 1996, the economy began to weaken and to support the Clinton political position, Rubin (Secretary of Treasury) and Greenspan embarked on a policy of expanding the money supply.

Way the fed expands money supply is add and cheapen the cost of bank reserves; incentivizing lending by the banks; in turn increased borrowing by consumers, business, government, and real estate purchasers. From 96, economy expands because of the punch provided by additional borrowed liquidity until the punch affect worked its way through the economy; then the economy rolled over (late 99).

Now you can't get the economy turned around because debt service on existing debt consumes all available liquidity--none available for new consumption; or for investment; or for new government projects. Not enough available in the real estate market to turn the economy around but no collapse yet.

Same condition caused the Great Depression of the 1930's. During the 20's, fed expanded debt through the stock market margin debt process. End result same as we will see soon. Nothing to blame Bush for as far as the condition is concerned.

But Bush and Treasury ought to recognize the condition as it really exists and develop policies to deal with the real underlying problem--too much debt.