Be Careful What You Believe Between Now And the Presidential Election

Yesterday Fox Business posted an article about the jobless claims data reported this week.

The article reports:

A sharp drop in the number of weekly jobless claims filed last week was caused by the failure of one large state to report all of its claims, a Labor Department spokesman confirmed to FOX Business.

Initial jobless claims, which are a measure of the number of people recently laid off, fell by 30,000 to a seasonally adjusted 339,000, the lowest level in more than four years.

But the Labor Department spokesman said the numbers were skewed by one large state that underreported its data. The spokesman declined to identify the state, but economists believe California is the only state large enough to have such a significant impact on the overall numbers.

Evidently, the state that did not report their numbers forgot to include that stockpile of unprocessed claims in their tally for this week (which is the first week of a new calendar quarter),

This is the equivalent of saying all of your bills are paid because you are haven’t gotten to the pile of bills you left on the kitchen table. We are truly in the silly season and need to discount at least ninety percent of what we read or hear from the media. Just for the record, the number will be revised upward, but at a time when no one is paying attention.

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