Bloomberg is reporting that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its annual revision to the unemployment data this Friday February 5th, 2010. Oh by the way, the birth death model was off by 824,000 jobs. For anyone familiar with this fairy tale of statistical manipulation it will come as no shock. Bloomberg does a nice job of explaining the revisions in their interactive analysis.
I have commented before on the utter uselessness of the government’s unemployment statistics. Every month workers mysteriously disappear from the labor force and are no longer counted as unemployed. Must be alien abductions or maybe they all hit the lottery?
The media consistently reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics U-3 number as the “official” unemployment rate. Of course this number does not count people that they have run out of unemployment insurance or those who given up all hope of finding a job or better yet those who have had their hours reduced to 10 hours a week from 40. Those people are counted in the U-6 figure which you never hear about.
The way I figure it, if you start with the U-6 figure, remove out the obviously erroneous birth death model revisions and add back in the people who keep disappearing from the labor force and the real unemployment number is easily over 20%.
Oh but everything is just fine and dandy, we have green shoots. Right up the ass.
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