Juicing The Jobs Numbers

Posted by Melissa Clouthier on Apr 2 2010 Filed under Economy, Newsstand, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Bloggingstocks asks if it’s good news or bad:

In March, the U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs, the largest one-month increase in three years. The unemployment rate held steady at 9.7% as the labor force increased by 398,000. Many, yours truly included, warned that we need to take this data with a grain of salt, thanks to temporary workers hired to help with the U.S. census report. According to the data, just 48,000 of the 162,000 jobs added came from the census.

Expectations called for an increase of 200,000, with half of those jobs coming from the census. That wasn’t the case, so I am not sure if this is good news or bad news. I lean toward bad, not because I am a pessimist, but because the 162,000 jobs added fell short of the expected 200,000.

Some experts will dance around this data, stating that it was nearly in line, but I am not buying it. The data fell short. Furthermore, there are far fewer temporary workers than were expected — of course, that could be good news, right? MarketWatch also cautions us to not read too much into the data thanks to a rebound from the February snowstorms.

So, if we have to throw out a good portion of this data, should we believe it at all? I know there are some groups that will tout job growth and a positive impact on the economic situation; there are also others that are going to warn investors to take this data with a major, major, major grain of salt. If we have to take so many different factors into account, why pay any attention to this data? There are many that will focus on the data because it will help their stance.

My thing? It seems like you can’t trust anything this administration says. I’ll believe it, when I see a trend.

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