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Author Topic: Seasonal adjustments are easy to manipulate in job numbers  (Read 127 times)

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Offline mystery-ak

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Seasonal adjustments are easy to manipulate in job numbers
« on: August 06, 2025, 11:31:12 am »
August 5, 2025
Seasonal adjustments are easy to manipulate in job numbers
By Jack Hellner

In the September 2024 jobs report from the Department of Labor, the seasonal adjustment was the largest on record. They had a seasonal adjustment of 460,000 which gave them a chance to claim that 254,000 jobs were created:

    US Job Growth Surges on the Strongest Seasonal Adjustment Effect on Record

    September 2024 had the biggest seasonal adjustment factor on record compared to like months of September in history (chart 1). I had expected a strong seasonal adjustment factor to be a turning point in favour of a strong gain in jobs, but not this strong! Chart 2 shows why this mattered. The 460k gain in seasonally unadjusted nonfarm payrolls last month (red bar) translated into a seasonally adjusted gain of 254k.

The report happened to be the last one before the 2024 election. That does not look like a coincidence. It looks like the rigging of the numbers or cooking the books.

Besides monthly negative adjustments on job numbers that are rarely amplified, the BLS made a huge 818,000 negative adjustment in August 2024 for the period April 2023 to March 2024.

How much inaccuracy would it take for the media to think someone should ever be fired from the government if that person were appointed by a Democrat?

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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/08/seasonal_adjustments_are_easy_to_manipulate_in_job_numbers.html
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Offline Free Vulcan

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Re: Seasonal adjustments are easy to manipulate in job numbers
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2025, 11:36:11 am »
And they have been for a long long time.
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Online DefiantMassRINO

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Re: Seasonal adjustments are easy to manipulate in job numbers
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2025, 01:23:01 pm »
Fed Chairman Powell has based his interest rate decisions on faulty, untimely data that mispresented the state of the employment market.

These numbers are not reliable enough to make timely mark-to-market decisions.  At best, they can be used to measure longer-term trends and infer the mid-term direction of the economy.

With these numbers, the revisions are more relevant than the initial readings.  These statistic gathering and probability prediction techniques are too anti-quated for investment markets driven by computer algorithms.

The speed of the economy has accelerated while the Government's data gathering and analysis remains in the Land of the Lost.
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