"Last month many were surprised to see the jobs report claim 244,000 jobs were added yet the unemployment rate ticked up 2 tenths from 8.8% to 9.0%.
The widely proclaimed reason from mainstream media was that jobs were more plentiful and because more people were looking for jobs.
That explanation makes sense on the surface in light of the official definition of unemployment (you had to have looked for a job in the last 4 weeks to be counted as unemployed). However, the explanation does not stand up to scrutiny.
The fact is, employment fell by 190,000 according to the Household Survey and another 131,000 people dropped out of the labor force last month or the unemployment would have been even higher. Fewer people (131,000 to be precise) wanted a lob and looked for jobs in April than in March.
The Obama administration as well as mainstream media wants to play job numbers both ways, that is to say they want to use the Household Survey when it suits their purpose and the Establishment Survey otherwise.
Regardless, close scrutiny of the details in the report shows the headline numbers were far worse than they looked.
I commented on that in my Friday post BLS Jobs Report: Nonfarm Payroll Headline Number Looks Good, Beneath the Surface, Awful where I said ..."
at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/05/digging-still-deeper-in-fridays-jobs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MishsGlobalEconomicTrendAnalysis+%28Mish%27s+Global+Economic+Trend+Analysis%29
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