Weekly Jobless Claims On The Rise, Pointing Towards Bad June Jobs Number

Unexpectedly, I'm sure.

Will this week, the week ended June 16, get revised higher next week? We literally cannot remember the last time it wasn’t. So it’s a good guess than when all’s said and done, last week, the week ended June 16, will probably be around 390,000 or so.

For one thing, that’s just terrible, close enough to 400,000 — a level that is broadly speaking a demarcation line between job growth and job losses — to keep the Obama Reelection Committee members up at night. This week is also key because it’s what’s called the survey week, or the reference week, the week that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses as the baseline for its monthly jobs report.

I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up: Apparently, while we speak of the "June jobs report," the survey for unemployment occurs in the last week of the month.

Unemployed persons [are defined as...]: Persons aged 16 years and older who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week.

So, if I understand this right, the actual monthly unemployment figure is based on a one-week snapshot, and that week was a bad one.

Which is another way of saying that it will somehow tick down by 0.1%. No matter how many people are unemployed, somehow it's almost always falling by 0.1%.

Thanks to CDRM.

posted by Ace at 03:22 PM

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