Jobless claims for last week were released a few minutes hours ago:
In the week ending July 3, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 310,000, a decrease of 39,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 349,000. The 4-week moving average was 336,000, a decrease of 10,250 from the previous week's revised average of 346,250.
Wow! That must mean the economy is still getting better, that the recent jump in claims in the past few weeks was just a "blip". But it's important to note that the official number is "seasonally adjusted".
The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 351,137 in the week ending July 3, an increase of 32,751 from the previous week. There were 483,401 initial claims in the comparable week in 2003.
Now I'm not here to argue that there are statisticians at the Department of Labor plotting insidiously to defraud the American people by manipulating jobless data. However, the possibility for that scenario did increase substantially this year when the DOL and BLS moved to a seasonal adjustment which can be altered quarterly versus only once a year.
To give the DoL some credit, they did admit that the adjustments may have been a bit off mark, due to the fact that not all the companies they expected to shut down for their annual maintenance actually did so last week. Generally, the second week in July is the when most businesses shut down, which is why the seasonal adjustment is 127.0 (last week's adjustment was 113.2.)
So will we then see a huge jump next week? Hence the importance of the 4-week rolling average.
The good news is that although headlines generally touted the 4-year "low", the articles themselves were a bit less willing to cut the Administration any slack, speculating that the dip was just a blip on the screen.
Posted by MB Williams at July 8, 2004 10:00 AM | TrackBack