– by New Deal democrat I wasn’t able to get to either the GDP report or the jobless claims report yesterday. I’m going to hold off on the GDP report until next week, because there was a lot going on, but this morning (before the ISM manufacturing Index comes out) let’s take a look at jobless […]

 – by New Deal democrat There was no new official data reported this morning, including the normal monthly report on housing permits, starts, and construction. Yesterday the Department of Labor did partially update several weeks of jobless claims data, which helps us estimate what might happen with the unemployment rate when the September jobs report is […]

Forecasting a further upturn in the unemployment rate: what works?  – by New Deal democrat Yesterday I read a post over at Seeking Alpha in which the author confidently predicted a recession in Q1 next year, based exclusively on the NAHB builder sentiment index. Here’s his accompanying graph, comparing builder sentiment with the unemployment rate […]

Continuing improvement in new jobless claims re-sets the clock  – by New Deal democrat Let’s get the easy part of this morning’s slew of data out of the way first:  initial jobless claims declined -7,000 to 221,000. The 4 week average declined -3,750 to 233,750. With a one week lag, continuing claims declined -50,000 to […]

The unemployment rate is not *uniquely* overestimating the “true” employment situation Bill McBride a/k/a Calculated Risk put up an entry over the weekend positing that the employment situation is worse than the unemployment rate indicates. He bases this on the expectation that the overall labor force was expected to grow by 100,000 a month in 2020 […]

Lifted from an article in the NYT. In the heat of media debates certain fundamental narratives get lost regarding the tools we use to evaluate policies. Pre-occupation with unemplayment is one of them. While familiar to readers of Angry Bear, it bears reminding ourselves that while ‘economics’ attempts to figure out how the economy works, […]

Yup.  The Republicans won the sequester fight. Congrats!