Jobless Rate Reaches 3-Year Low, According to Official Reports
The jobless rate apparently fell in January, though it took an adjustment more than 10 times the amount of the supposed gains to get there.
The good news is that the U.S. government, in the form of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, says that the employment picture in this country is getting better. The bad news is that the numbers have been "massaged" so thoroughly that it’s really hard to understand exactly what these numbers ever mean. The real headline here is that the numbers gave a boost to President Obama. And that, my friends, may be all the information you really need as you delve into these reported numbers – numbers that will, mind you, be repeated verbatim by the financial press without even a moment’s thought as to what they really indicate.
According to the official statistics, nonfarm payrolls increased by 243,000 in January, dropping the jobless rate in the U.S. to 8.3% (again, as reported by the government). Said Sung Won Sohn, economics professor at California State University Channel Islands, "More pistons in the economic engine have begun to fire, pointing to accelerating economic growth. One of the happiest persons reading this job report is President Obama." Indeed, that must certainly be true.
The weird thing about this supposed growth in jobs is the "seasonal adjustments" that are being made by the BLS. This has been standard practice for years, as it is well-known that temporary jobs come into existence in November and December, only to be generally over by January. Each month, seasonal adjustments are in the millions of jobs (just shy of 3 million for this latest adjustment), while the numbers being reported are in the hundreds of thousands. One must wonder, then, if the adjustments are vastly higher than the reported numbers, what’s really going on? Non-seasonally adjusted numbers for January showed that between 2 and 2.3 million jobs were LOST. What’s this all mean? Well, it means that people in government don’t want you thinking too much about what’s going on in the economy. It also means President Obama has a "nice report" to point to in his re-election bid.
According to the official statistics, nonfarm payrolls increased by 243,000 in January, dropping the jobless rate in the U.S. to 8.3% (again, as reported by the government). Said Sung Won Sohn, economics professor at California State University Channel Islands, "More pistons in the economic engine have begun to fire, pointing to accelerating economic growth. One of the happiest persons reading this job report is President Obama." Indeed, that must certainly be true.
The weird thing about this supposed growth in jobs is the "seasonal adjustments" that are being made by the BLS. This has been standard practice for years, as it is well-known that temporary jobs come into existence in November and December, only to be generally over by January. Each month, seasonal adjustments are in the millions of jobs (just shy of 3 million for this latest adjustment), while the numbers being reported are in the hundreds of thousands. One must wonder, then, if the adjustments are vastly higher than the reported numbers, what’s really going on? Non-seasonally adjusted numbers for January showed that between 2 and 2.3 million jobs were LOST. What’s this all mean? Well, it means that people in government don’t want you thinking too much about what’s going on in the economy. It also means President Obama has a "nice report" to point to in his re-election bid.
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