Lost in the noise last week was the unemployment report. Weekend pundits gushed how we turned the corner. Have we?
Art Cashin dissects it this morning:
- For the last eight weeks, Initial Unemployment Claims have averaged 450,000 per week. So, over the last four weeks [the month counted], 1.8 million people were laid off. How does that fit in with the claim that 290,000 new jobs were created? The obvious answer is that it doesn’t
- The CES Birth/Death adjustment added 188,000 of those jobs. Birth/Death does not refer to people but to businesses. The BLS guesses how many new companies opened versus how many closed their doors. The BLS then uses that guess to guess again how many jobs those business created or lost
- Another 66,000 of the new jobs came from census hiring
- Another 26,000 of the new jobs were non-census temporary
Let’s recap:
- A guess produced 188,000 of the jobs, 66,000 were census and 26,000 were temporary.
- 280,000 of the 290,000 “new jobs” were either temporary or the result of guesswork.
Some turn. Some corner.
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Exactly right. But Congress and the Media have been trying to get people to believe all is ok.
We need to extend Tier 5.