Something To Chew On

Here is something to chew on. The top headline at Bloomberg this morning reads as follows:

Breaking News
•U.S. Loses 539,000 Jobs, Fewer Than Forecast, in Sign Economy Stabilizing

"Fewer than forecast" is a curious statement. Why, you ask. Because, as Calculated Risk points out, the "fewer than forecast" job loss put the unemployment rate at 5.9%, which is worse than the government's "more adverse" assumption in its recently completed stress tests. In other words, it would seem that the government's most negative forecast was somewhat rosier than most others were forecasting on average. Go figure.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/05/employment-report-539k-jobs-lost-89.html

And by the way, before you start popping the cork on this "fewer than forecast" result, I recommend you read the fine print. The private sector lost 611,000 jobs. The government would have lost jobs too but for the Census Bureau hiring 140,000 "temporary" workers to prepare for the census this coming year and that still only netted around 72,000 new government jobs. In other words, but for the Census Bureau doing temporary hires, the actual job loss is not significantly better than the 699,000 loss in March. So you can go with the Bloomberg spin on this being a sign that the economy is stabilizing. Or you can look at the press release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where they characterized April as follows:

"In April, job losses were large and widespread across nearly all major private-sector industries."

Chew on that!

Disclosures: None