Didn't we just get news last Friday that the unemployment rate dropped to 4.9%? If this is the case, why has the 10-year t-bill, a good indicator of how well the economy is doing and is expected to do in the near future, dropped to 1.67% vs. 2.36% as recently as November? If we were truly so close to full employment, the yield on the 10-year t-bill would be going higher, not lower.
The trick is that the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) uses a seasonal adjustment number to account for retailers slowing down after the holidays. In this case, they used 2.165 million jobs as the seasonal adjustment number. This number is mostly random. Had the BLS used the 2010 seasonal adjustment number, we would have lost 183,000 jobs instead of adding 151,000 jobs. There is no consistent formula used to determine this number and it appears that the BLS has a huge amount of latitude to use a number that makes the amount of jobs added look better than it really is.
No doubt that obama wants to make his last year as good as it possibly can be, so we will see what tricks he has up his sleeve. The first one was the budget that was originally submitted in mid-December and was slated to have juiced the economy by an extra 0.7% in 2016. Remember, if obama doesn't get everything he wants, it's the Republicans who are "shutting down the government" regardless of the $500 billion that is scheduled to be added to the debt in 2016.
The trick is that the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) uses a seasonal adjustment number to account for retailers slowing down after the holidays. In this case, they used 2.165 million jobs as the seasonal adjustment number. This number is mostly random. Had the BLS used the 2010 seasonal adjustment number, we would have lost 183,000 jobs instead of adding 151,000 jobs. There is no consistent formula used to determine this number and it appears that the BLS has a huge amount of latitude to use a number that makes the amount of jobs added look better than it really is.
No doubt that obama wants to make his last year as good as it possibly can be, so we will see what tricks he has up his sleeve. The first one was the budget that was originally submitted in mid-December and was slated to have juiced the economy by an extra 0.7% in 2016. Remember, if obama doesn't get everything he wants, it's the Republicans who are "shutting down the government" regardless of the $500 billion that is scheduled to be added to the debt in 2016.