The payrolls data still looks fine, but under the hood are signs of deterioration for the growing number of people who are unemployed or keen to switch jobs.
not full timers. bad news. gretchen: is there a silver lining at all in the fact that the weekly numbers have been going down, yesterday it was 123,000? that s a positive, no question. 323,000 new jobless claims a week is a pretty good number. that s down trend, consistent down trend that. is, may be, something of a silver lining. but that refers to the layoff rate. that s the number of people who are losing their jobs and claiming benefits. the other side of the coin is what new jobs are being created? there is the bad news and we re going to get more of that today, i suspect. gretchen: seems like we re sort of in this holding pattern. you know when you want to land in your airplane? it seems like the economy is in this holding pattern. it s not good enough. gretchen: we ll be talking to you about it. thanks. have a great show today. catch him 9:20 a.m. on the fox business network. did disturbing trend growing among american teens. what they re smoking now and it s total
zone for some reason. ecuador is deciding whether to grant him asylum. bill: americans getting in the unemployment line dropping slightly. however, this comes after the u.s. government lowered it estimate of gdp growth down to 1.8% showing that our economy may still have a long way to go. stuart varney with me now comes on the air at 9:15. let s get it in quickly. what does it tell us? reporter: this latest number tells us the layoff rate is far too high for this stage of the recovery. income has gone up a little but spending has lagged. a 1.8 per annual growth rate is very slow. so if you read all of these tea leaves, put it all together we have another year of high unemployment.
business network. first the news today, what do you see happening here? each of the last three years we hope the recovery, the recovery will finally start and have real steam to it. in each the last three years the hopes have been dashed and same again now. 385,000 people applying for first-time jobless benefits is far too high. that is huge jump from the past couple weeks, bill. bill: three weeks in a row the numbers have bonn up. we ve seen this pattern at the begin of each year for three years in a row? yes. for three years, there have been hopes that finally, we would have a robust recovery. and each time, the number of people being laid off as opposed to hired but the layoff rate, that s what this number measures, its layoff rate, it popped back up again. for each of the last three years, hope springs eternal, hopes dashed by a divorcening of the labor market situation. bill: do any job cuts have to do with the sequester,
workplace drive. i want you to give us the good, the bad, and the ugly on the kind of workforce roundup at the end of the year. start with the good. what s the good news in terms of the workforce right now? the good news you just mentioned matt is that the unemployment rate is down to 8.6%. and we forget that for 29 months, that rate had been above 9%. so that s not bad. over the last more than a year, every month for the last 13 months, monthly job growth had been positive. that is, we ve been creating more jobs than we ve been losing. that s a good thing. and the other thing that is a little bit of a secret in the data, if you look at some of the bls figures, is that now for a long time in this recession, you had more people who were leaving jobs involuntarily than voluntarily, all right? the involuntarily is called a layoff, the voluntary is called a quit. now for the last several months, the quit rate has been higher than the layoff rate. which suggests that people are feeling