533,000 Jobs In November

Gone.

Lost jobs = less demand for real estate.

As a back of the envelope calculation, lets see what the paper damage would be.

In Las Vegas, the multipliers we used (if I can remember them correctly) were as follows:
1 industrial employee = 1000 SF
1 office employee = 350 SF
1 retail employee = 250 SF

If you turn those employees into commercial space, we are looking at millions of SF of space just *poof* no longer needed.

A more sophisticated way to approach this would be to use an I-O (input-output) multiplier, where each employee is turned into a dollar amount of spending (equal to approximatly their wage), and that spending is in turn spent on goods and services, which is then used on goods and services, etc.

This process continues forever, much like fractional-reserve banking, with the end result being greater than the sum of its parts.

This is called the multiplier. If the average US wage is 36K a year, and we lose 553,000 jobs, then this would be a theoretical net loss of $19 billion dollars. If that $19 billion dollars had been allowed to flow through the economy, and using a conservative consumption multiplier of 1.4, we just lost (or know that we lost) around 26.8 billion dollars of spending.

This is called in the macro-economics business as a "decrease in aggregate demand".

The sad thing is that these are official numbers, there are a large number of people who are not counted that probably should be.

For example is a little known unemployment number U-6, which counts unemployed, discouraged workers and full-time downgrades into part-time employment (underemployment as opposed to un-employment).

This number is 12.5%

Simply in order to keep up with population growth, employment needs to increase by 125,000 jobs per month. Note also that the length of the typical workweek dropped to 33.5 hours. That's the shortest number of hours since the Department of Labor began keeping records on hours worked, back in 1964. A significant number of people are working part-time who'd rather be working full time.

Coupled with those who are too discouraged even to look for work, I'd estimate that the percentage of Americans who need work right now is approaching 11 percent of the workforce. And that percent is likely to raise...

-Robert Reich