<<wonder why>> ... me too, wondering why and wandering all about, aimlessly, waiting, patiently, perhaps for a considerable period, for the defining moment of desperate and despairing realization.
Message 20108836
<<Some folks are hanging quite a bit of hope on what apparently is good April news on the job front, even as we have it on good authority (herr Doktor Richebacher) that the similarly good March news was a desperate scheme constructed to induce the comatose investoriates onward to willing ruination via pathetic lies, through bold fraud, and by way of controlled statistics …
" ... On April 2, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that nonfarm payroll employment in the United States had surged by 308,000 in March, allowing the administration to claim that the job recovery had finally arrived.
After taking a closer look, we concluded that was just another case of absurd statistics.
The monthly employment situation report of the Labor Department is based on two different surveys, the household survey data and the establishment survey. The first is a sample survey of 60,000 households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The second is conducted by the BLS in cooperation with state agencies, and includes 160,000 businesses and government agencies covering about 400,000 individual worksites.
According to the household survey, civilian employment increased from 137,384 million in February to 137,691 million in March, up 307,000. These are the raw, not seasonally adjusted, figures. Usually, employment rises in March due to seasonal effect. Accordingly, indeed, the seasonally adjusted data for March shows a decline by 3,000. In other words, zero job growth.
In the establishment survey, the raw numbers are even much worse. Nonfarm payrolls, not seasonally adjusted, increased by just 7,000 in March, as against 307,000 in the household survey. Now you would expect that seasonal adjustment would produce an even steeper decline than in the household survey. Miraculously, seasonal adjustment went in a diametrically opposite direction, turning the paltry raw number of 7,000 into a seasonally adjusted spectacular jump of 308,000.
Wondering how this is possible, we found out that virtually half of this big employment gain owed to a statistical method called the “net birth/death model.” The BLS explains that due to its “inability to capture, on a timely basis, employment generated by new firms,” it feels the need to use some special adjustments.
“To correct for this systematic underestimation of employment growth, an estimation procedure with two components is used to account for business births. The first component uses business deaths to impute employment for business births.” In essence, this means the more businesses are being liquidated, the more new jobs through business births are “imputed.” The second adjustment component is the X-12-ARIMA software model, being used to account for seasonal effects on the net birth/death ratio.
[EDIT by Jay: this above revelation is simply too funny, if not so sad, seeing perfectly good folks democratically following unelected financial leaders that give them the chemical light treatment with in broad day light]
In March, the two methods of calculation had a dramatic result: 153,000 of the 308,000 new jobs derived from the “net birth/death model.” The other half of the alleged job growth came mainly from two sectors:
construction (71,000) and retail trade (47,000).
Again, according to the household survey (seasonally adjusted), employment in private industries fell by 175,000; the number of self-employed workers fell by 288,000. If there had not been a steep increase in government employment by 439,000, the March job report would have been a disaster.
Last but not least, another oddity from the establishment survey: Average weekly hours fell in March; in fact, they fell so much that total hours worked declined even as the work force surged...>> |
