Liar, Liar, Stats on Fire! - Granite Grok

Liar, Liar, Stats on Fire!

Figures don't lie, but liars figureNew jobless claim numbers are out today from the Bureau of Lying Statistics, and they are down by about 30,000, which the Lapdog media are using to go after Jack Welch for suggesting that manipulation was involved in last week’s suspicious drop of the U3 unemployment rate to 7.8%.
As always, when the media is cheerleading for the Regime, it pays to look under the covers:
Last week’s unemoyment claims were 369,000, and analysts had been expecting about 370,000 this week, according to Bloomberg, but instead they came in at 339,000, so what happened? Well, as Bloomberg reported in their article

One state accounted for most of the plunge in claims, a Labor Department spokesman said as the data were issued to the press.

Hmmm, and what happened in that state, which was rumored to be California?

Borrowed from PolitifactWell, it turns out that, due to a quirk of how ‘earnings related’ jobless benefits are calculated, there is a rush of filings at the end of the quarter, which may not be processed until a week or so later. Seems that California failed to include those outstanding claims in the total for the first week of the new quarter, and thus under reported by 30,000 claims! Accident, or collusion with the B(L)S? We report, you decide!

Background from Forbes

[I]t seems this week’s data was skewed by a large state failing to report quarterly figures. “Some are saying it was California, though we cannot confirm that,” says FTN Financial economist Chris Low. “As a result, the reported plunge in claims is suspect. We expect claims will continue trending lower through the quarter, as there is strong seasonal bias downward anyway…But the big drop this week will likely be revised or be followed by a pop upward next week.”

And Marketwatch on those missing claims

Added Stephen Stanley of Pierpont Securities: “The formula for the size of a claimant’s benefit check is derived based on an average of their last few quarters of pay (the more you were earning before being laid off, the bigger your unemployment check would be). Thus, in many cases, it pays for a laid-off worker to game the formula by waiting until the beginning of the next calendar quarter to file (if they can wait that long), as they may have been getting paid more in the quarter when they were laid off than in the quarter that rolls out of the equation if they wait.”

“As a result, there is an accumulation of claims that are likely submitted over a period of several weeks but not processed until the turn of the quarter. Apparently, the state in question (and it pretty much has to be California to account for anything close to 30,000) forgot to include that stockpile of unprocessed claims in their tally for this week (which is the first week of a new calendar quarter). Since the seasonal factors expected an unadjusted surge of almost 20% in the period to account for the quarterly filing pattern, failure to adhere to that pattern in the raw data (unadjusted claims were only up 8.6%) creates a big drop seasonally adjusted.”

Original tip: Twitchy.com

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