Friday, March 8, 2013

Jobs, Workforce Participation Rate and Seasonal Adjustments

I guess everyone has their own "Slant" on the economic data such as this headline by Drudge...

Which links to an article from CNS news, I know that is hardly unbiased, but they do have at least one thing right in their headline:

296,000 Americans Drop Out of Labor Force in February; 89M Not Working


This is the infamous "Labor Participation Rate" that the BLS ignores, which has the effect of making the jobless picture look better than it is. 

This is sort of like a permamnent "seasonal adjustment", which skews data to the positive side like it did last year, it tends to end around March and when it did last year, we saw the economic data go from beautiful to a nightmare almost overnight, starting the May 1 decline.

However there's something a little more disturbing in this report, other member have noticed it and I mentioned it earlier today, the Revision.

Today's 236k beat of 165k consensus was impressive, enough to scare the QE crowd, however, equally impressive was the downward revision for last month's data:157k to 119k !?!? 119?

How do we go from 119k to 236k in a month? At this rate the BLS's data is noisier than the infamous ADP data.

I have to wonder if the F_E_D is looking for a stage left exit sooner rather than later, no matter what needs to be done to get there. The reason is simply, monetary policy is easy to get in to, it's a nightmare to get of and from the last two releases of the minutes, it seems the F_E_D is becoming more and more aware of that fact.

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