Restaurant Performance

While we all very capable of discerning the 'recovery' facts from the peddled recovery fiction throughout President Obama's reign...

While the US manufacturing sector has been in a clear recession for the past year as a result of the collapsing commodity complex, so far the stable growth in low-paying service jobs - at least according to the BLS' statistical assumptions - such as those of waiters and bartenders have kept the broader service economy out of contraction (even though recent Service PMI data has been downright scary). 

This is now changing: as we showed a month ago, according to the lagged effect of the collapse of the Restaurant Performance Index, that party is over:

For many months, the general consensus was that the "malaise" in US manufacturing (which is clearly in a recession) is isolated, and would not spread to the service sector. That is no longer the case.

As a very gloomy Markit report noted earlier,

In the new bifurcated normal US economy, with the manufacturing sector unofficially in recession, it has been the growth of the services sector, and, as we detailed here, implicitly the surge in "bartenders & waiters" jobs, has saved the government's "recovery" statistics in the last few years. Given the recent performance of the National Retail Association's Restaurant Performance Index, the jobs recovery 'party' just ended.

Since December 2007, it is clear where the jobs gains have been...

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

After a series of stunning declines through the month of January and the first half of February, global financial markets seem to have found a patch of relative stability at least for the moment.  But that does not mean that the crisis is over.