Wampum

So take the last two weeks of revised numbers - 388,000 for the week of Oct 10 and 390,000 for the week of Oct 17. There you have a 2000 claim increase while the headlines all touted the lowest claims in 8 months. I gotta admit - they got this gig down pat.

I'm not sure exactly what your complaint is on the revision of the weekly numbers. OF COURSE initial claims are going to be revised upward each week--some numbers come in late as local agencies submit late claims. And for the same reason, it's unlikely these numbers will be revised downward--few local agencies are going to say, "You know those 27 new returns we sent you last week? Three were fakes and so there should only have been 24 of them."

You make it out like it's some kind of conspiracy, when it's only the vagaries of data collection....

His point is very simple, they're not comparing the same numbers so the new unemployment claims APPEAR to be dropping, even when they're actually increasing.

Preliminary numbers have been consistently low for the last few years. Thus each Thursday, two numbers are released: the initial number of new claims this week, and the adjustment for the claims last week. But when they make a comparison to the previous weeks numbers, they compare the current INITIAL number to last weeks ADJUSTED number, an adujustment that is, consistentnly, upwards. As long as the week to week increase is smaller than the week to week upward adjustment, the GVT can report weekly decreases while the number of new claims is increasing.

Consider the following three week scenario:
Week 1: Init. 382,000; Adj. 388,000
Week 2: Init. 384,000; Adj. 390,000
Week 3: Init. 386,000; Adj. 392,000

Now in the above example, the number of new claims for unemployment is unquestionably rising. But since the initial number of each week is compared to the adjusted number of the previous week, each week the government can (and does) report that the number of new claims for unemployment has actually decreased in the previous week. Thus decrease + decrease + decrease = increase.

Is this some "Bush Administration Plot"? No. Just another example of garden variety statistical manipulation from Washington.

As an addendum to the above (can't edit), I guess the point of this is that the Department of Labor should not announce a "decrease" in circumstances where the initial reported number is equal to or larger than the previous weeks inital reported number. While not actually dishonest, per se, it's clearly disingenuous. They should instead tell the truth: we are not sure if the number of new unemployment claims have increased this week, pending release of the final adjusted number.

Initial claims ARE dropping--you just don't seem to want to admit that. In late August/early Sept initial claims were 400,000-420,000 or more. Lately they've been around 380,000-390,000. That's a DROP, after adjustments, after whatever.

It's clear you'd prefer a RISE in these numbers--so would I, frankly--but it's just not happening. Semantics are just semantics, and if you think the world revolves around every Thursday morning's initial claims report, then think that. As I wrote earlier, such an interpretation is inevitable (and inconsequential).

Plenty of people are paying attention to the 4-week moving average or to the long-term trend, and that's dropping as well. Bush won't get reelected because the BLS is being less than perfectly precise.

Wise up.

Yes, claims have dropped to around 390K. That's actually a very good thing. The more people, LIKE my family, who are not unemployed, the better.

However... Until initial claims drop below 350K, we will not see job creation. The 400K number was developed years ago, and is now outdated - but it's one of those institutional beliefs so ingrained it's tough to get rid of - so we live with it.

If everything is so peachy, why the massive list of layoffs at the bottom of the DOL release? The fact is, people are getting laid off from good paying manufacturing and professional jobs, and are forced, like me, to take part time/seasonal work because there's nothing else available. Call one of the software developer agencies posting on DICE - ask them how many resumes they get for any one posting. It used to be in the thousands - I guess the economy must be getting better if it's now only in the hundreds.

Seems to me that all they need to do is to produce a single weekly figure which contains all the claims NOTIFIED TO THE COLLECTION AGENCY in the current week.

This number will include late receipts from last week and the preliminary figures for the current week. It is statistically irrelevant which week the number goes into.

The political problem is that they are able to guarantee that the dumb US public cannot remember from one week to another what the situation was. So the revised number is slipped through and this weeks number again LOOKS LIKE A REDUCTION when compared with the revision from last week.

The US exists in the space created by cognitive dissonance, without it all would be lost.

The Democrats should be releasing their own numbers based on the available data and simply amalgamating them as above. Then they club Bush with them. When he whinges they ask him to explain why their numbers are wrong. That being a challenge greater than he can manage and too close to the truth for any of his attendant demons, they can take over the agenda.

Maybe initial claims are down because the number of people who CAN be unemployed is a finite number and that number is very, very soon to be reached?