Posted on 08/03/2012 6:09:39 AM PDT by Pearls Before Swine
BLS Bureau of Labor Statistics
Happy by the headline establishment survey print of 133,245 which says that the US "added" 163,000 jobs in July from 133,082 last month? Consider this: the number was based on a non seasonally adjusted July number of 132,868. This was a 1.248 million drop from the June print. So how did the smoothing work out to make a real plunge into an "adjusted" rise? Simple: the BLS "added" 377K jobs for seasonal purposes. This was the largest seasonal addition in the past decade for a July NFP print in the past decade, possibly ever, as the first chart below shows. But wait, there's more: the Birth Death adjustment, which adds to the NSA Print to get to the final number, was +52k. How does this compare to July 2011? It is about 1000% higher: the last B/D adjustment was a tiny +5K! In other words, of the 163,000 jobs "added", 429,000 was based on purely statistical fudging. Doesn't matter - the flashing red headline is good enough for the algos.
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
The key takeaway for me is that any changes in the employment picture are small compared to the statistical noise. It's the classical problem of trying to detect a signal in the presence of overwhelming noise.
ping
Took me a bit to make some sense out of the. The author might have taken a little time to add 000s to the appropriate numbers, that way the addition and subtract would see to work out.
Meanwhile, yes that was a large seasonal adjustment.
You could use Kalman filtering techniques. But then they’d be trapped in the mathematics, and unable to lie and fudge the numbers. Ok, they could still lie, it would just be harder and even more obvious.
Yep. Obama cooked the books. That was obvious at the July 14th numbers. All of a sudden there were 240,000+ extra people employed.
Obamacare will help either put the unemployed on disability or just outright kill them. Job numbers will look great then.
The U.S. economy lost 4.3 million jobs in President Obama's first 13 months in office. It still has to gain 316,000 jobs for him to break even."
http://www.money.cnn.com/news/economy/storysupplement/obama_jobs_timeline/
Obviously we should just hire all the unemployed do paperwork, half to fill out paperwork and the other half to file/shred it.
It is like the 21st century equivalent of digging a hole and filling it back in....
The laughable part of this report is that even with the re-fried numbers, the rate STILL went up a tick. Obama’s minions are probably p-o’d about that.
I sure hope that a Romney Labor Department starts off by going back and correcting all of the mystical magical sham-wow numbers that have been foisted upon the public over the past 3 years (frankly, that’s the only way Romney will be able to show any actual improvements before 2016).
Then I hope they cut their staff to almost nothing and relegate most of their “services” to the states. But I’m probably dreaming about both of those hopes.
I don't actually believe BLS is cooking the books, although Obama would like that. They are probably doing the best they can to guess what the adjustments should be. But, when the adjustments are several times as large as the net result, you can't have any faith in the monthly numbers as indicating any trend.
I bet Obama will be trumpeting the upturn in employment in a speech soon, and say that the unemployment uptick is just due to the statistics!
Seriously?? They have been playing with the numbers ever since the rate hit 10%. Actually, I found a reference to indicate that "long-term discouraged" unemployment were actually officially done away with in 1994... during the Clinton years. So it isn't like this is a new art form.
# jobs, not seasonally adjusted
June 134,072,000
July 132,860,000
=
-1,212,000 fewer jobs in July
After running -1,212,000 through 2 statistical tools: the Birth and Death model and seaonal adjustment
-1,212,000 becomes +163,000
Thanks; Indeed it would have.
As a life-long bookkeeper, I would have been jailed by now for using such math to produce numbers ‘the boss’ wants to see.
It still has to gain 316,000 jobs for him to break even.””””
PER MONTH
It isn't as cynically bad as what happened with the CBO scoring of the ObamaCare act, where the CBO is only allowed to project out ten years, so they set it up with ten years of estimated income into the system and six years of benefits.
I meant BLS “has’nt been” instead of “has been” in post 16.
It is like the 21st century equivalent of digging a hole and filling it back in....
Watch the film Brazil to see how it's done
Boss: “So, did we make the $1 million quarterly sales figure?”
You: “Seasonally adjusted, we did.”
Yeah, not going over too well.
I have tried to find the seasonal adjustments for each month going back a year or more without luck. I have a suspicion that the total adjustments for a year do not add up to zero. That in fact they add up to a lot of “fudged” jobs. I can’t seem to find them on the government site, even though in the past I did.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.