employment

[Doug Henwood]

By the way, today's U.S. employment numbers were deceptively strong. 
Payrolls rose 143,000, but mainly because of a quirk in seasonal 
adjustment. Normally, retailers hire just before Xmas and lay off 
just after; seasonal adjustment is supposed to compensate for this 
recurring pattern to get a picture of the underlying trend. This year 
they didn't hire (in fact it was the 4th-weakest Xmas season in 
retail employment since 1939) - and so this January they didn't lay 
off as many as usual. The SA effect is large: before adjustment, a 
million jobs were lost in retail; after, there was a gain of 101,000. 
Hotheads like John Crudele of the NY Post will call this cooking the 
books, but it's not. Seasonal adjustment is usually a good thing, 
though sometimes it can play tricks on you. Similar seasonality 
affected unemployment: after adjustment it fell from 6.0% to 5.7% - 
but it rose 0.5 points before adjustment. There are other quirks that 
make the January unemployment number iffy - you can read about them 
at <ftp://146.142.4.23/pub/news.release/empsit.txt>.

Basically the U.S. economy is flat to slightly positive at the macro 
level, and sort of awful at lower levels.

Doug