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The Lies Have It

2/7/2019

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Do you know how horrific the latest jobs report was?

Get it here to see the numbers for yourself:
​https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

Table B-1 (page 33 of the PDF) is where the action is.

The far right of the top line is where you find the "fantastic" news that 304,000 jobs were created in January.

The BLS counts on you not reading its BS and sadly this administration isn't any better than the last one in giving us the real employment (or financial) situation.

It's true the real numbers are released - if you know where to find them and how to read them.

For those of you that haven't had to do any modeling, let me briefly talk about Seasonally Adjusted. You probably understand that there are a lot of flowers sold in February, fireworks in July, and toys in December.

Businesses like to make projections. It helps for planning things like purchasing inventory and adjusting personnel levels.

If you were a toy company forecasting January sales just based on what happened during the 4th quarter, you'd be off quite a bit because sales of toys drop in January. Seasonal adjustments are a way of smoothing the data so that better forecasting can be done.

Back to the jobs report - notice that those 304k jobs is a seasonally adjusted number. While on the right side take note the the jobs gain from November to December is 222,000. That makes 526,000 new jobs in the last two months. Aren't times great?

Look at the columns on the left for the non-seasonally adjusted data. That's what what we see in real life.

The number of employed for the last 3 months:
November: ​151,375
December: 151,182
January: 148,201

Let me do that math for you.
In December we lost 193,000 jobs.
For January the loss was 2,981,000.
Total jobs lost the last two months - nearly 3.2 million.

The difference between the reported gain and the actual loss is 3,700,000 - I ran the numbers twice as it seemed odd that it should be such a round number.

So, how good do you feel about 3.2 million people losing their jobs?

But John, there was a partial shutdown of the government - that explains the losses.

Take a look on PDF page 36 on the line Federal, except U.S. Postal Service.

You'll see a loss of 4,500 jobs for December and 3,900 jobs for January. That's less than 9k jobs out of the 3.2 million loss.

While you have the PDF open, look at table A on page 9.

The top line reads Civilian noninstitutional population. Page 6 explains this is an annual adjustment that Census provides BLS. This shows 800,000 less population than the Census Bureau was projecting for this time from a year ago.

This reduction in population growth is stunning. The economic and demographic impacts are well beyond what we can discuss here. Just be aware - it isn't good.

Have a nice day.
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