by David Stockman, Lew Rockwell:

Maybe it is time to don our tinfoil hat. Here’s the flat-out lie the WSJ reported this morning in response to the weekly unemployment claims release. It sure did make you think that the jobs picture is improving by the week:

The number of people receiving benefits through regular state programs, which cover the majority of workers, decreased by 1.1 million to 16.2 million for the week ended July 11. The decline extends the recent trend, with the number receiving benefits the lowest reading since the week ended April 11.

Just to make sure you grasped the good news, the WSJ added this chart for good measure:

Actually, there was no improvement at all this week!

And what remains is the greatest labor market disaster in history. As Wolf Richter observed in his excellent post on the heels of the DOL (Department of Labor) report:

If you read this morning or heard on the radio that 16.2 million people were claiming unemployment insurance – the “continued claims” – and you thought that there were only 16.2 million people who claimed unemployment benefits, you fell victim to lazy misreporting in the media, by reporters or bots that didn’t read the Labor Department’s press release beyond the second paragraph.

Not even close, of course. The true number is 31.8 million, just a tad below the peak two weeks ago, and implying that fully 20% of the US labor force is unemployed.

It’s all in the report, but apparently the Wall Street Journal reporter – we are speaking to you Eric Morath – was either too lazy to read below the second paragraph, or too dimwitted to see that even as the blue bars (state UI beneficiaries) have been falling slightly per the WSJ’s misleading chart above, the red bars (the Federal PUA and PEUC beneficiaries) have been rising rapidly and are still at record levels.

So when you look at the total (and correct) unemployment picture, you see that the labor market has been treading water for nine weeks.

Moreover, when you cross-check these DOL data with its June report on the total civilian labor force, you get an answer that the stock market cheerleaders who claim to be the business press wouldn’t approach by a country mile. To wit, the civilian labor force as of June was 159.9 million and the number of workers currently at home collecting the dole is 31.8 million.

Whether by the old math or the new, that computes to an unemployment rate of 19.9% and it’s a figure that has not been seen since the dark days of the 1930s.

It’s hard to believe, of course, that reporters are this lazy, but you can’t gainsay the obvious. As Wolf Richter further noted,

The issue is that the claims under federal programs are new, established by the CARES Act, and the Labor Department just inserts them further down in the press release, and then it provides a total of state and federal claims further down – the 31.8 million – instead of putting the total in the first line of the first paragraph so that even lazy reporters or lazily programmed bots, who’ve for years reported only the first two paragraphs, can see it.

That’s right. They are not really even hiding the data, but the business press has been house-trained for so long to report only good news and positive deltas that not one in a thousand reporters has ever even seen Wolf Richter’s charts (which he has been publishing weekly since May) because they obviously repudiate the V-shaped recovery narrative.

For want of doubt, however, here is Wolf Richter’s explanation of what’s in the red portion of the bars above. It both underscores the absolute disaster caused by Dr. Fauci’s Lockdown Nation and also explains why Washington politicians are now sweating bullets as they argue over re-upping Everything Bailout 4.0.

Self-evidently, without the $75 billion per month that Uncle Sam is firehosing into the smoldering ruins of the labor market via these special Federal UI programs, there would already be riots in the streets that would make the recent Minneapolis altercations looks like small potatoes:

Unemployment insurance under federal programs.

Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA): 13.18 million continued claims. PUA covers contract workers, the self-employed, and others – the “gig workers”: During the week, 974,999 new claims were added by 48 states.

This means initial claims under state and federal programs combined this week totaled 2.35 million (1.37 million initial state claims plus 974,999 initial PUA claims), a huge number of people newly out of work!

The total number of people claiming benefits under the PUA program declined to 13.18 million, from 14.28 million last week, as more workers that had been receiving PUA benefits were dropped from the rolls, likely because they’d started working again.

Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC): 940,113 continued claims, about flat with the prior week. PEUC covers people who don’t qualify for other programs.

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