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United States News Title: NYT Blog Tries to Pre-Spin Horrid Job Number Coming It snowed this month in much of the United States. And that may create unnecessary fears that a double-dip recession is upon us. Why? The Labor Department employment report to be released on March 5 will say that it is for February, but the fine print will say it is for a particular week. Both the household survey (which produces the unemployment rate) and the employer survey (which produces the job count) ask about workers in the week during which the 12th of the month fell. For February, that was the week of the 7th to the 13th. There were blizzards on the East Coast the previous weekend, and again during the week. That means that a lot of people who had jobs may report they did not work during the week, and companies may say they had fewer people on the payroll than they would have cited a week earlier or later. If so, we may get a truly horrid job number. Bob Barbera, the chief economist of ITG, points out that something similar happened in January 1996. The first report for January said the economy lost 206,000 jobs. Here is an excerpt from the Times article reporting on that: “The effects of the severe weather, which unfortunately I am unable to quantify with any degree of confidence, make it difficult to determine whether a change has occurred in underlying labor market trends,” Katharine G. Abraham, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Financial markets were left just as baffled by the job figures as the experts at the Labor Department. . . . Some analysts found more evidence of a deteriorating economy in today’s report. “We are flirting with recession,” the National Association of Manufacturers said. And economists at Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street investment house, told clients that “fundamental weakness continues to emerge in timely indicators that are unlikely to be distorted by freak weather.” A month later, this appeared in The Times: In what appeared to be a stunningly strong rebound from the economic impact of January’s blizzard, American employers added 705,000 new jobs last month while the unemployment rate fell three-tenths of a percentage point, to 5.5 percent, the Labor Department said today. . . . Indeed, H. Erich Heinemann, head of the economic research unit at Brimberg & Company, an institutional broker, called the February report little more than “statistical catch-up” and derided the notion that “some great explosion” in economic activity had taken place when job growth in the first two months of 1996 was very similar to that in the comparable 1995 period. Today, the history does not look quite as interesting. After all the revisions. we now think there was a loss of 19,000 jobs in January 1996 and a gain of 434,000 jobs the following month. We also think that job growth did accelerate in 1996, and again in 1997. As for the overall economy, growth in G.D.P. had slowed to 2 percent for all of 1995 (Fourth quarter over fourth quarter). It accelerated to 4.4 percent in 1996 and stayed above 4 percent in 1997, 1998 and 1999. Note that analysts understood in 1996 that the weather had affected the numbers, but they could not tell how much. Even knowing weather had an impact, those who were predisposed to think that the economy was weak were quick to seize on the January figure and to discount the February one. It is likely to happen again. From the left, we will hear that the preliminary February figures show that a new stimulus package is desperately needed. From the right, we will hear that this is proof the Obama administration is failing. In fact, the figures will prove little.
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#1. To: dont eat that (#0)
I pointed that out weeks ago...
Day 2 of Packrat refusing to register here.
Given that the stimulus was a complete failure, the bailouts have not ended the problem of the banks not lending, who in their right mind beleives anything the govt. says will solve this problem?
Goldi-Lox: You're one dumb-fucking bitch.
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