John Williams (shadowstats) on the December payroll jobs report and unemployment rate: As increasingly has become the common circumstance, the upside revisions in headline monthly numbers simply are constructs of highly unstable, inconsistent and questionable seasonal adjustments being shifted between months. The unadjusted data do not revise, but the adjusted data pick up bogus growth from gimmicked reporting . . . Counting All Discouraged Workers, December 2014 Unemployment Was 23.0%. . . . More than anything else, though, what removes headline-unemployment reporting from broad underlying economic reality and common experience simply is definitional. To be counted among the headline unemployed (U.3), an individual has to have looked for work actively within the four weeks prior to the unemployment survey. If the active search for work was in the last year, but not in the last four weeks, the individual is considered a “discouraged worker” by the BLS [and not counted in the U.3 measure]. ShadowStats defines that group as “short-term discouraged workers,” as opposed to those who become “long-term discouraged workers” after one year.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 19:13:58 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015