This news comes on the heels of the controversial unemployment miracle report of last week. Gee, it’s almost as if giving the impression (and the headlines to follow; see, e.g., WRAL’s “US jobless claims fall to 339K, fewest in 4½ years“) of an Amazing, Eleventh-Hour Keynesian Miracle is of prime importance in what is, coincidentally, the last month of the presidential campaign.
Wall Street Journal writes “About That Unusually Large Drop in Jobless Claims“:
A Labor Department economist told Dow Jones that a big part of the decrease came about because one “large” state — they didn’t specify which one — didn’t report “additional quarterly figures as expected.” So while it may seem like one state reported fewer layoffs, that isn’t the case. It was purely a function of missing data, and next week the glitch should be smoothed out of the data. The state in question wasn’t specified.
CNN Money offers some more insight:
Many economists speculated that the state is California, but the Labor Department will not confirm that until it publishes its state breakdown next week.
“It was likely a state with a large population and we suspect that it was California based on the occasional massive swings that have occurred in its claims data in the past,” said Daniel Silver, economist at JPMorgan, in a note to clients.
Dutiful true believers in the media and elsewhere are still sitting in the data patch earnestly awaiting the Great Keynesian Recovery, Charlie Brown, hoping that their sincerity will be rewarded.
An ecstatic Linus is about to be embarrassed to discover
that his imaginary Great Pumpkin is actually just a dog.
