Last week Obama did a victory jig over last month’s unemployment numbers. He scheduled the news conference a day ahead so of course he knwo what was coming. The numbers showed that something like 50,000 thousand private sector non farm jobs were lost last month and 25,000 new jobs were “created” from General Motors!
Well today we had the weekly unemployment numbers and don’t you know it, nation wide, only 450,000 people filed claims. This number was lower than expected. great right?
Here is the rub, because of the Labor Day Holiday, officials in nine state did not actually count the number of claims that were filled. What they did instead is guesstimate how many people filled unemployment claims last week. Among the nine states was California which just happened to guesstimate the best numbers in the past four months. Hmm imagine that.
Here is AP falling all over themselves to declare that because of this “guesstimate” the economy must be improving… Good thing they told us.
“NEW YORK — Gains made by the dollar overnight were mostly erased Thursday after a steep drop in unemployment claims in the U.S. provided the latest encouraging sign about the nation’s economy.”
AP does note, in the very last sentence that US Dollar is falling against the Yen but they don’t even question how that could be with the “economy improving.” I guess the currency traders did in fact do their own “guesstimate”
“The dollar fell to 83.80 Japanese yen, just above the 15-year low touched earlier this week.”