The BLS would morph into a punch line if the stakes weren’t so high.
Let’s do the easy part first.
Now we’re up to at least 22 election season weeks in a row that the BLS’s “headline number” has under-reported the number of initial unemployment claims … and cast the jobs situation as brighter than it really is.
Based on Thursday’s BLS report, the number for the week ending Sept. 29 was revised upward from 367,000 to 369,000.
I’ll complain to the BLS Commish when President Obama appoints one.
see the HFs post: BLS Commissioner’s post vacant since January
* * * * *
Bigger Issue this Week
This week, the BLS reported spectacularly good news … claims down 30,000 (after revising last week’s claims up).
While the BLS report failed to mention the point, somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 claims from California weren’t processed in time to be included.
Say what?
Business Insider did a nice job decoding the situation:
Some of the jobless claims in one large state–California–were not included in the claims reported to the Department of Labor this week.
When a state’s jobless claims bureau is short-staffed, sometimes the state does not process all of the claims that came in during the week in time to get them to the DOL.
Our source [at the BLS] believes that this is what happened this week.
The California claims that were not processed in time to get into this week’s jobless report will appear in future reports, most likely next week’s or the following week’s.
In other words, those reports might be modestly higher than expected.
Our source believes that the number of California claims that were not processed totaled about 15,000-25,000.
Thus, if one were to “normalize” the overall not-seasonally-adjusted jobless claims number, it would increase by about 15,000-25,000.
This week’s “normalized” jobless claims number, therefore, would be about 355,000-365,000, not the 339,000 that was reported.
Are you kidding me?
And, Business Insider missed a key line in the BLS report:
“The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending September 29 were in New York (+2,764) and California (+2,069)”
So, the missing California claims may be even higher … if the missing regions kept pace with the rest of the state
This is getting silly.
The Homa Files 
October 18, 2012 at 2:30 pm |
[…] Unemployment claims are down (if you don’t count California) for […]
October 19, 2012 at 7:15 am |
Yet another Chicken Little tempest in a teapot. Maybe we should start sending donations to California so they could afford to hire enough staff to complete their weekly reporting on time.