Friday, January 06, 2012

This month's report from the Bureau of Lies and Statistics:

CNBC:

Unemployment Falls to 8.5%; 200,000 New Jobs Created


The U.S. unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to 8.5 percent last month as job creation was more robust than expected, providing continued signs that the nation's labor market is improving gradually.


Growth in manufacturing jobs helped offset a loss in government positions, while wages edged higher and the length of the work week also lengthened a bit.

The unemployment rate — a hotly contested number because of the rise in potential workers who have quit looking for jobs — has fallen 0.6 percentage points since August.

However, an alternative measure of unemployment that counts discouraged workers also dropped sharply. The so-called U-6 number, more encompassing than the headline number the government publicizes, dropped to 15.2 percent from 15.6 percent in November.

"Overall the report was pretty solid through and through," said Brad Sorensen, director of market and sector analysis at Charles Schwab in San Francisco. "This helps to continue the snowball rolling downhill, as the more people hired and the more people working increases demand. Employers have to hire to meet that demand. It gets the ball rolling and we are starting to see a self-sustaining expansion phase take hold."

The labor-force participation rate, considered another key metric regarding optimism in the workforce, was unchanged at 64 percent. The average duration of unemployment remains near a record high at just under 41 weeks, though the number of those unemployed for 27 weeks or longer fell by 92,000.

Those not in the workforce at all finished 2011 at an annualized record high, but even that measure fell in December to 2.54 million, a drop of about half a million.

the rest of that nonsense here

Now, I'm not feeling up to the rant at the moment so I'm just going to borrow Zero Hedge's

Massive Beat? Not So Fast - Morgan Stanley Warns 42,000 "Jobs" Bogus Due To Seasonal Quirk
Tyler Durden's picture


Enamored with the 200,000 number? Don't be - the reason why the market has basically yawned at this BLS data is that as Morgan Stanley's David Greenlaw reports, 42,000 of the 200,000 is basically a seasonal quirk, which will be given back next month, meaning the true adjusted number is 158,000, essentially right on top of the expectation. From David Greenlaw: "some of the strength in this report should be discounted because of an seasonal quirk in the courier category of payrolls (Fed-ex, UPS, etc). Jobs in this sector jumped 42,000 in December, repeating a pattern seen in 2009 and 2010 (see attached figure). We should see a payback in next month's report."


And this piece as well:

Real Jobless Rate Is 11.4% With Realistic Labor Force Participation Rate
Tyler Durden's picture


One does not need to be a rocket scientist to grasp the fudging the BLS has been doing every month for years now in order to bring the unemployment rate lower: the BLS constantly lowers the labor force participation rate as more and more people "drop out" of the labor force for one reason or another. While there is some floating speculation that this is due to early retirement, this is completely counterfactual when one also considers the overall rise in the general civilian non institutional population. In order to back out this fudge we are redoing an analysis we did first back in August 2010, which shows what the real unemployment rate would be using a realistic labor force participation rate. To get that we used the average rate since 1980, or ever since the great moderation began. As it happens, this long-term average is 65.8% (chart 1). We then apply this participation rate to the civilian noninstitutional population to get what an "implied" labor force number is, and additionally calculate the implied unemployed using this more realistic labor force. We then show the difference between the reported and implied unemployed (chart 2). Finally, we calculate the jobless rate using this new implied data. It won't surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% (final chart) - basically where it has been ever since 2009 - and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.

Labor Force Participation since 1980:

Reported and Implied number of Unemployed:


Difference between Reported and implied unemployment rate:

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4 comments:

Always On Watch said...

Now that we are back on the road to prosperity, Obama has called for a raise for federal workers.

You can't make this stuff up!

Unknown said...

Obama to launch summer-jobs initiative will cost the U.s. Taxpayer a whopping $1.5 billion the White House says is already on track to create 180,000 'Summer job' “work opportunities” in the private sector in 2012.That is the number of opportunities, which includes mentoring and unpaid internships, that companies have told the administration they are willing to create. Some 70,000 jobs are paid.

Hmmmm......How many will loose their job, so the boss can hire 'sponsored' youth?

Epaminondas said...

1) During the so called recovery median income of WORKING PEOPLE dropped by ~10%, why? Because while Boeing was closing plants, Dunkin Donuts was expanding. But hey, they're jobs, right?
2) Take the number, add 20,000,000 off the deep end of compensation, and then refigure.

Unknown said...

I presume they will wait to fire the 500.000 military men till after the 2012 elections?