‘Outlier’? Desperate Reuters Reporter Works to Minimize Impact of Awful Jobs Report
The unemployment rate jumped to a seasonally adjusted 9.8% in November and only 39,000 seasonally adjusted jobs were added during the month, according to the Employment Situation Report released yesterday by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although she at least recognized the report's negativity, Lucia Mutikani at Reuters seemed bent on downplaying its impact, even finding an “expert” who characterized the BLS's work as an “outlier” in her Friday evening write-up. Nobody's claiming the folks at BLS are perfect, but I cannot recall a time when an establishment press wire service reporter has questioned the Employment Situation Report's underlying validity. Despite its supposed lack of credibility, Ms. Mutikani still used the information provided as an excuse to insert a point about how it should cause Fed chief Ben Bernanke to continue the “money from nothing” enterprise euphemistically referred to as “quantitative easing.” Of special note was Ms. Mutikani's bizarre contention that the seasonal adjustment calculations might be flawed. Unfortunately for her, comparisons of actual results on the ground (i.e., the not seasonally adjusted numbers) to the seasonally adjusted numbers that resulted were consistent with November 2004, the last comparable year. This has not always been the case in the volatile economy of the past 2-1/2 years. Here are the first eight paragraphs from Ms. Mutikani's morose musings (bolds and number tags are mine): read more
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‘Outlier’? Desperate Reuters Reporter Works to Minimize Impact of Awful Jobs Report
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on December 4, 2010. Filed under