Reclaiming Common Sense

This week was "Jobs Week." Normally jobs week is the first week of the month. The first day of the month was a Friday, and it was a Friday after Thanksgiving, so the report, and the ADP report, were pushed back one week. This column produced a pre-ADP jobs report and a pre-Employment Situation Report jobs report. This column produced two more jobs report articles and the weekly unemployment claims report article.


(Dec. 5) Jobs week starts with a jobs forecast article. "November Jobs Forecast: Holiday Cheer" projected non-seasonally adjusted Part-time Jobs Gains, full-time job losses, a mixed picture for unemployed workers, and a huge surge in private sector workers. The Devil was going to be in the data revisions to the prior data and the seasonal factors used to convert the non-seasonally adjusted data to the seasonally adjusted data.


(Dec. 5) The article "What to expect from Nov. ADP" projected year over year November growth in all sectors other than Information Technology, and month to month growth in six sectors. It projected strength from the seasonally adjusted data.


(Dec. 6) Wednesday's November ADP report was good, not great. Instead of nine sectors up year to year and 6 up month to month, nine were up month to month and six were up year to year. "ADP November: Bumping Along" revealed that the annual growth rate is up significantly from last November.


(Dec. 7) The weekly unemployment claims data was released on Thursday - they still do that. "Golden Weekly Unemployment Claims Data" details how we have the lowest first week of December first-time unemployment claims data since 1970. The same can be said for the fourth/final week of November datum for the non-seasonally adjusted continuing claims data. Oh, and we have 140 million people who are "covered insured" right now compared to the 50 million, or so, covered insured during 1970. The data for that isn't available. It was 54,000,000 covered insured during 1973.


(Dec. 8) The Jobs Report was good as this column projected. There were 221,000 private sector jobs were added, seasonally adjusted. The September and October data were revised higher. The unemployment rate and unemployment levels were recorded, non-seasonally adjusted, at levels not seen during the month of November since 2000. The is was a "Stellar November Jobs Report."


The data is the data. The data this week was remarkable. Let's get people to start talking about the data and not the report.


It's the economy.