put lipstick on this pig. welcome to "your $$$$$." i'm ali velshi. christine romans the host of your bottom line, my good friend, has been studying these numbers. she breaks it down for us. christine, everybody who watches knows some jobs day we have some area of disagreement. i can't find one. >> you and i are together on this. the glass is half empty. you and i both see it that way and it's rare. 69,000 jobs created. this the world's largest economy, the world labor the world follows, the biggest driver of growth. there you go. if people don't have a job, they can't be spending money. here is the trend, look. this is what's important. you don't look at one month of data. you like to see what the trend is nor markets and economics. the trend after 200,000 jobs created and more, people are saying, it's healing, look, the rearview mirror, a slow jobs recovery, then a stall here. one of the reasons might be europe. quite frankly when your biggest customer has countries in it that are in recession, that doesn't mean if you're a big company in this country you want to be adding workers. that could be part of it. private and public sector jobs. you and i talk a lot. 86,000 private sect or jobs created. you want to see more than that. 13,000 private sector jobs lost. there's that tug-of-war, private sector trying to create jobs, public sector losing jobs. that's where it gets political. you hear people on the gop say, this shows the president's policies aren't working. >> the problem is what's the answer to that? if the president's policies representative working, how do those that say we should be cutting spending fit into the equation. >> public spending will mean more public sector job loss, which means you'll have another drag here. for the gop you have a double edged sword in these economic numbersf you're talking about the politics of the jobs report. most people aren't talking about the politics. they are talking about their personal economy and whether there are more opportunities. >> who is going to swing into politics fast, possibly within the next couple minutes. before we get to will, diane swonk, chief economist at mesirow financial. why after seeing and feeling an economy that looked like it was chugging along quite nicely are we seeing this and the revisions of the last couple of mondays. what that weakened. >> a couple things are important. first, reduce the economy with unseasonably warm winter weather and had some payback to that these numbers go far beyond to payback of unseasonal wechlt they are weak. they are weak in a lot of areas we need to take note of. it is important, too, you noted the wedge between public and private sector employment. that had narrowed. many people had taken on with the first cut of gdp in the first quarter with local cut in the first sector rising this would not be the headwind. yesterday that dat ark was revised down, this week that data revised down. now we're showing state and local governments are continuing to cut the bulk of the public sector job losses were, again, teachers. on the federal level postal worker reduction in payrolls there. that's where we saw the rest of it. mostly teachers at the state level, local weather. again, that wedge. the public sector now beginning to play the headwind once again. also europe, let's face it. we're not an island. not only is europe weak but china is weak. china is weakening. china buys a lot of our heavy manufacturing equipment. the global economy, again. we're not an island. this matters. uncertainty. we saw exuberance of the '90s people invested even when it was wasteful, now a pullback uncertainty about policies, kicked down the road -- the thirst year we kicked down the road policies fiscally and u.s. and europe and accumulated and got worse. there's no reason to make certain about a bet in the future even when you've got a bet on your balance sheet in front of you. >> you gave fantastic answers without invoking politics. will cain, it was moments after that unemployment came out you heard from everybody politically what was wrong with this world politically. i argue to you will cain this issue transcends the ability of barack obama to deal wit. these head winds are global, as diane said, some are cyclical but nonetheless it will work into the election. >> i love the way diane broke it down. china, europe, uncertainty. i would agree on two of those three factors. china and europe are outside of the president and policymakers' control but policy is not. if i have a criticism of barack obama it lies in that uncertainty. when businessmen across the country don't know what the tax rate they will pay in the next year or what the regulatory environment will be or how their health care will be handled, that creates uncertainty. >> let me stop you there. i want to bring christine in to complicate it more. >> it's not complicated enough. >> you have a number there. talking about underemployment. a lot of people tweet me, say unemployment risen to 8.2%. people think i am flat out lying to them. >> there's a labor market that's a labor market measured, people in the market working on actively looking for a job and unemployment rate is 8.2% of that group. then there's a group called the underemployed. that's a bigger number. in the job report it's 14.8%. those are people who are unemployed, marginally attached to the workforce. they are working part time for economic reasons. they would like to be working fulltime, for example, but they just can't get that job. this is the underemployment rate of 14.8%. that's a more troublesome number. there are people who throw in, talk about real unemployment rates bigger than that. they are throwing in people who aren't in the labor market, discouraged and dropped out for years, people who would like to be working but can't. lou at the population, american population that's working. you know, it's less than 60% of adults working. so there are a lot of different numbers to look at. you'll see the politicians parsing these. >> you're in the same studio as me and you can't see will's case. i'm not sure if he didn't eat good food or something is troubling him. >> you're looking at christine and saying that doesn't make sense. >> it all makes sense, you can play the death star music when lou at numbers. the guy in charge of the schizophrenic economy no matter whether he's to blame for it or not is going to pay the price for bad news. >> hold this thought. we will divvy this with all the folks. it's like will, i gave him a piece of chewing tobacco and didn't let him spit it out. what happens when the safety net is gone. a lot tweet me about it. let's talk about it. forty years in the making, one of the largest public works products in american history i went inside new york's new subway line. i'm going to tell you why no matter where you live, you're paying for a piece of this. there are a lot of warning lights and sounds vying for your attention. 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[ man ] saw 'em in '83 in fresno. place was crawling with chicks. i got to go. ♪ any way you want it ♪ that's the way you need it ♪ any way you want it ♪ christine said something interesting a few moments ago. she said the whole larger macrodiscussion isn't important. she said it's what's around you, what affects you, that's what's important. i want to show you a map of the united states color coded into red, green, gray. those states in red have an unemployment rate substantially higher than the national average. those states in green have an unemployment rate that is below the national average. those in gray, keep in mind while they don't look like there's as many of them, they are heavily populated. look at everything east of the mississippi, a lot of gray. right about the national average of 8.2%. this is interesting. a chunk of this country in the middle doing well. this election, christine romans this election is going to come down to votes in swing states, places like ohio, florida, where unemployment is going to matter. >> that's why you're seeing the obama administration fine-tune the attack on the mitt romney's record as a job creator, bain capital, massachusetts. this started as an attack on bain capital and private equity and moved quickly into what kind of economy he really left in massachusetts. they are going to keep hammering on that because they want to appeal to those lunch bucket democrats in towns and cities in battle ground states who say, the factory that closed down the road, people like mitt romney who did that, people like barack obama who saved the auto industry. that is the story line at least they are going to try to keep because those battleground states are important this time around. >> i think this is a fascinating analysis. barack obama and the democratic machine have a tough pill there. they have a tough job. that's convincing americans this economy is headed in the right direction. i think, in fact, that's why they went onfor the bain capital attack because that was the easier one to make. that didn't work, moving to a stewardship of massachusetts, they have to tack that from the left. meaning two things, attacking health care and job production record. that's not a strong place to tack from unless, as you point out, micro target that. hey, the national creation isn't that great. in ohio, not that bad. i don't know if you can micro target. that's interesting. >> i want to take this somewhere else. diane you pointed out in our last conversation that a lot of these jobs are teachers. they are state employees. as state employment rates improve in those green states, they lose the ability to offer extended unemployment benefits. by the end of summer, extended unemployment benefits, 99 weeks, 79 weeks in some cases will be gone. states are scaling back on seasonal benefits, checks that might go out to school bus driver, for example, 5.4 million americans officially out of work for more than six months or longer. this is a doubly complicated issue now. we're going to be pulling back on some employment benefits. that's going to affect demand and employment further. >> absolutely. the one issue that isn't clear-cut, once you pull back on unemployment insurance those signature on the sidelines would jump back in the labor force and take any job at any price at any wage. what we did see last month many of those workers dropped out, ran out of benefits. nine states dropped benefits, lost benefits in the month of april. many of those people actually, the long-term unemployed fell. they stopped looking for a job for a month. now they started looking for a job again but there's no jobs to be had. that's where the difficulty is, even if they are looking for work they are not getting jobs and not getting paid now. we know from different surveys many long-term unemployed have -- most of them borrowed money from friends, families, living with families, doubling up, putting additional financial stress on families as well. that is collateral damage. the only silver lining in this situation is, the weakness in the economy, global economy brought down oil prices. that's a defacto cut. prices are plummeting. that will help consumers with more disposable income they didn't have this year. >> as you have pointed out before, the relatively mild winter meant we didn't get into higher oil prices, even though oil prices were high they didn't hit people as much as they could have. >> right. we didn't pay heating bills. >> everybody out there saying i'm going to vote for somebody and jobs will become a big issue, is there a logical solution to what is looking like the intractable problem of our time of high unemployment and not fast enough job creation? >> well, you know, i think will made a good point. we do agree on this, uncertainty. if we are able, our worse problems today, the economy is going to grow at a subpar pace, do that out of the financial crisis. partly a given. the extent to which that happens is man made. there's not enough women leaders, i believe, that's my personal view. at the end of the day the problems we have are political in europe and the u.s. until we move forward on those political road maps that uncertainty, additional uncertainty exacerbating the problem of making these decisions when you're on the margin it really matters. it becomes more than noise. dissidents overwhelms. we don't want that dissident we now have fiscal cliffs of spending cuts substantial and retroactive along with tax hikes at the end of this year, beginning of next year that we they'd to deal with within the context of reduction. >> when you leave, and i say thank you, i want you to go to the greenroom, you'll see the president of the university of pennsylvania, her book called the spirit of compromise. i want you to explain why this uncertainty gets blamed on democrats by republicans, because nobody is compromising. >> i'll say this and take this up back stage. before you throw a parade for bipartisanship you can have authority takenship. >> kidding me, president obama -- >> just because you have one person or one party that could theoretically get policies they want doesn't mean you'll get certainty. >> that's a good point. the president of the university of pennsylvania will talk about partisanship. i tweeted you about this, who you think more to blame for partisanship in america, politicians or voters who put them there. thanks to all of you. will, great to talk to you. diane swonk mesirow financial and christine romans, your bottom line, you watch on saturdays. how is the economy doing? so many conflicting indicators i've spent the week pulling my hair out. let's figure out it when we come back. uh-oh. 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[ male announcer ] stop the uh-oh fast with kaopectate. all right. you can be forgiven if you're confused by the recent news on the economy. some indicators are looking up, others are looking down. as we've been discussing, the most important thing is jobs. this is all the way from the beginning of the recession. well, almost the beginning of the recession. this is the end of 2008 all the way through here. we've had 20 straight months of job creation. but any optimism there has been offset by a severe slowdown in the number of jobs added each month. that's not all. let's look at how consumers feel. this is a consumer-driven economy. according to thomson reuters of michigan, they have a report every month called consumer sentiment. that's just one year. it showed in may consumer sentiment rose to its highest level since 2007. before the recession when the dow was at its all-time high due to what it says are more favorable job and wage prospect. that sounds positive. then a different body, the conference board, released its own report that says consumer confidence in may fell to its lowest level in five months because americans are less optimistic about jobs and business conditions. now, that sounds awfully pessimistic to me. that's confusing. i should tell you this report tends to be a much bigger survey than the other one. why are they going in different directions. one other thing, let's look at housing. national association of realtors said existing home prices, existing homes they rose in april by 10.1% compared to the previous year. that's a positive trend. it said it showed back-to-back price increases from a year earlier for the first time in two years. however, that was quickly followed by something called s&p case-shiller home index announcing home prices in april fell 2.6% from a year ago. a negative trend it said showed prices at their lowest since 2002. getting confused? so am i. why the discrepancy? here is one explanation. the way two indexes track sales and prices. realtors track existing homes that sell each month. s&p case-shiller compares the price they sold for compared to what the same home sold for in its previous sale. i don't know what's right or wrong but whatever the explanation, it's very, very confusing. which is it? are things looking up, or are they working down? joining me michael pinto, president of pinto strategies, registered investment advisory. his firm is a registered investment advisory and john, president and ceo of liter capital, fund manager in oregon. let's start with you. you don't see mixed signals in the economy. >> gp has been very anemic, home sales very anemic on the price level. i tend to put a lot more credence in case-shiller index. look at nonfarm payroll growth. >> numbers of jobs created. >> the most disturbing part, we lost, losing 15,000 goods producing jobs even after the recession began in december 2007 we are still not producing jobs in this country that can sell goods overseas. >> an investing expert. in a minute i'll get to what you should do about it. for the moment things are not looking good. john, what's your take? >> i have to tell you, we think things are getting betterment look, you have to look for the silver lining. nobody does anything until they have to. somebody has to -- i agree with you, the numbers are confusing. statistical data are confusing. let's talk about what's important, the bigger picture. what's going on in europe, the confidence in governments, to say the least is waning. to give you an example, governments issued 50% less in europe, corporations have issued 50% more debt. what you're seeing globally is a huge gravitation away from institutions and people investing in governments to seeing them invest in corporations, because it's a safer bet. they are more well managed. they have their house in order, run on gaap accounting. what we're seeing is borrowing cost for corporations coming in at all-time levels. seeing a huge, massive amounts of refinancings. that is going to set the table for large, large profits and cash in corporations. that is what's going to start moving in another direction. >> you completely see this differe