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Mac Slavo has written up a good piece about our government's obfuscation of real data:

If you’re only paying attention to President Obama, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the mainstream media, you’d think that the employment situation in America was getting much better.

The BLS reports that the unemployment rate dropped from 9.7% in May to just 9.5% in June. The recovery is well under way if you’re simply looking at headlines.

The fine print, however, tells a different story.







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The gummint figures are usually the numbers based on how many have applied for, and are receiving unemployment benefits.

You will probably see another substantial drop in the next month.

LarsMac;1320345 wrote: The gummint figures are usually the numbers based on how many have applied for, and are receiving unemployment benefits.

You will probably see another substantial drop in the next month.


Actually, no. Baselines are completely fabricated and they only use the U3 number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. And even the U-6 is manipulated.

And as ZeroHedge shows...the BLS's reading of U3 is wildly inaccurate:

What this chart implies is that if there was a mean reversion to the last 10 year labor force participation average rate of 66.2%, there should be another 3.5 million jobless added to the 14.6 million tally. And as this differential is the easiest thing in the world for the BLS to fudge, adding the two and dividing by the labor force of 153,74, we get an unemployment rate of 11.8%, leaving aside all other such fudge factors are government hiring, temporary workers, birth death, etc. 9.5% or 11.8% - which one is more realistic for an economy finally realizing it never left the second great depression, you decide.

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So what has changed between this government's reporting and the last government's reporting of these figures?

I ask from ignorance.

Can you show me that these figures are a result of this government's policies? My impression is that these things take a while to show in the data. I notice the steady plummet since 2008. If it was Britain I'd blame the previous administration...

Tombstone;1320349 wrote: Actually, no. Baselines are completely fabricated and they only use the U3 number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. And even the U-6 is manipulated.


All three of the lines show the same trend. The trend matters and the similarity of all three suggests that at least the three definitions aren't changing over time.

There's a "labor force" of 153.74 million, according to Zerohedge? That's out of, say, 215 million residents between the ages of 18 and 65? Reducing the numbers in jail would increase the labor force but even so there's a whole lot of people not being counted as potentially capable of work.

SOI Tax Stats - Individual Statistical Tables by Size of Adjusted Gross Income has a 2007 figure for Individual Income Tax Returns Filed which shows 96.25 million people filing income tax returns, of which 4.2 million show an income under $10,000 a year which I'd exclude from the employed total. I think that's a good indication that the US actually has 92 million people in work. Whether you take that as a proportion of the labor force or as a proportion of the adult non-pensioned residents, the proportion unemployed is a damn sight more than 21.5%. Taking U3 with all its hedges about "actively seeking", etc, is very arbitrary and exclusive.

Tombstone;1320336 wrote: Mac Slavo has written up a good piece about our government's obfuscation of real data:

If you’re only paying attention to President Obama, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the mainstream media, you’d think that the employment situation in America was getting much better.

The BLS reports that the unemployment rate dropped from 9.7% in May to just 9.5% in June. The recovery is well under way if you’re simply looking at headlines.

The fine print, however, tells a different story.If we can't trust the government to tell us the truth, then it's serving no good purpose.

Well, as for the Toyota event, and the RMB exchange rate, i think President Obama has already taken actions...