The nation actually had a good employment month in October.  The economy added 166,000 jobs, mainly in the professional and business services, health care, and leisure and hospitality sectors, and even construction was largely unchanged.

On the other hand, California lost 15,800 jobs, and year-over-year unemployment is up a full point to 5.6% (and that of course doesn’t include those who have stopped looking for work).  That’s also a full point over the national average.  The apologists that call themselves economists in this article are trying to spin the numbers but it won’t wash.

October’s decline in employment, the biggest since the loss of 14,000 jobs in July, confirms that the state’s economy is slowing, said Stephen Levy, who directs the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.

But “this is a slowdown that the nation is participating in,” Levy said. (Then why did the US add 166,000 jobs in the same month? -ed.) […]

Levy cautioned against making “a big deal” of the overall job loss figures.

“None of this is like when we lost our aerospace industry — that was permanent — or when the Internet bubble burst,” he said.

The current job losses do not signify any loss of strength in the state’s key economic sectors, he said. “It’s not like our economy is threatened from this.”

Really?  You mean the construction sector isn’t losing strength due to the housing meltdown?  And that isn’t driving economic trouble in all other sectors, as the end of refinancing and redecorating new homes depresses consumer spending?

Ever hear of trash-outs?

“An old wooden house along Genevieve Street in San Bernardino was the scene recently of a trash pickup for tenants who lost their home to a bank foreclosure.”

“On Thursday morning, the driveway was piled up with appliances, furniture and clothes that were littered everywhere – a telltale sign of a family that recently lived there. An old gas stove with a skillet full of dust was found. In the back yard, there were mattresses, a microwave, two mangled couches and a bulky refrigerator.”

“Foreclosed homes all over the Inland Empire are turning into what Lisa Carvalho calls ‘trash-outs’ – wooden and stucco carcasses with piles of junk left behind by former tenants.”

“The High Desert offers even more interesting tales. The area is full of tract homes in subdivisions that have stacks of furniture piled inside every room, she said.”

“‘These typically look like they’re occupied, but they’re not trashed,’ she said about these homes. ‘(The owners) just walk away and wash their hands of it.'”

Distressed properties (which are usually foreclosures or short sales) made up one out of every five homes listed for sale in Orange County last week.  And it’s hard to even say who’s in worse shape, homeowners, realtors, or financial institutions stuck with mortgages that will be defaulted without delay.

This is a crisis, and economists who keep their heads in the sand aren’t serving whoever it is they’re supposed to serve.  The legislation that would have at least helped to address this was blocked by Senate Republicans last week.  Where California is able to go in the next decade relies on stabilizing this housing situation.

Continuing my “sky is falling” rhetoric when it comes to the California economy, we now have over a million unemployed citizens, and even the positive job news is fleeting.

Despite a boost from the Hollywood job machine, the state unemployment rate ticked up in September, when more than 1 million Californians were looking for work, the first time that benchmark had been breached in nearly three years.

Jobs were added to the economy during the month but nearly half were in Los Angeles in the entertainment sector, according to figures released by the government Friday. Producers have been racing to get movies and television shows in the can in anticipation of a writers strike.

And Hollywood probably won’t deliver a happy ending. Strike or no, when the shows and movies are finished, many of those jobs will evaporate.

And it looks more like strike than no, as the WGA overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, by a 90%-10% margin.  That could happen as soon as Halloween.  Most studios aren’t signing writers to any future deals right now, in anticipation of a strike.  And the contracts of the Screen Actors Guild and the Director’s Guild are up next summer.

Besides meaning a lot of crappy reality shows coming to a TV screen near you, this means a great deal of production personnel out of work.  And that just adds to the strain on the economy right now.

Esmael Adibi, an economist at Chapman University, said it was important to note that payroll job growth had slowed to 1.1% in September from 1.6% in January and that beyond construction and financial services, the professional business services sector jettisoned jobs in September.

“Every indication is the weakness is becoming more broad-based,” he said. “Retailers are getting nervous about consumer spending, and clearly they are not adding to the employment base. The job machine is getting tired.”

There’s a certain irrelevancy to all of the back-slapping out of Sacramento for their presiding over a “fiscally sound budget” when you read stories like this:

Sales of houses and condominiums in the most populous Southern California counties fell 29.9 percent from the previous month and 48.5 percent from a year earlier, DataQuick Information Systems said on Tuesday.

The report covers the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura and showed a total of 12,455 new and existing homes and condos sold in September, the lowest since the company began recording the data in 1988.

Without being alarmist… aw, hell, I’m going to be alarmist.  The real estate market was the only thing propping up the state’s economy.  There’s an attempt to try and trade one bubble for another and re-create the dot-com speculation circa 1998, but that’ll only go so far, too, and that crash will be just as vicious as the first one.  And looming strikes in almost every aspect of the entertainment industry in LA will make life difficult as well.  It’s through little fault of state government, but you can see a pretty clear path to recession now.

UPDATE: On a somewhat related note, you can’t raise a family in California anymore.

The CBP analysis estimates that in order to pay basic bills in California:
A single-parent family needs an annual income of $59,732, equivalent to an hourly wage of $28.72.
A two-parent family with one employed parent needs an annual income of $50,383, equivalent to an hourly wage of $24.22.
A family with two working parents needs an annual income of $72,343, equivalent to each parent working full-time for an hourly wage of $17.39.
A single adult needs an annual income of $28,336, equivalent to an hourly wage of $13.62.