Tom Blumer took a look beyond the “seasonally-adjusted” job loss of 36,000 in February, and it just doesn’t add up:
The red-boxed 473,000 jobs added in February was a really poor result. It trailed the 2004-2008 average of 714,000 by about 240,000. January’s actual result was only 72,000 worse than the 2004-2008 average. That’s 168,000-job swing in the wrong direction.
Even though February 2010’s +473,000 is less than 2008’s +516,000, the seasonally adjusted job loss for February of -36,0000 — the one number the press and everyone else will singularly focus on — is less than 2008’s -50,000. Why? Because the 2009 disaster is mucking up the seasonal adjustment calculations, making the +473K look better than +516K, when it obviously isn’t.
As Tom asked, “If, according to you guys, we were in a recession in February 2008 (an assertion I have disagreed with since NBER made the call that it began in December 2007), when the economy added a lackluster (by traditional February standards) 516,000 jobs, what do you call it when February 2010 sees 43,000 fewer jobs added?”
Lest one says that it’s because there were fewer jobs in 2010 than in 2008, let’s first take a look at the actual number of jobs in January 2008 (135,840,000) versus the number of jobs in January 2010 (127,606,000), and see what the percentage increases between January and February in both years were. The rate of job-number change between 1/2008-2/2008 was +0.380%. The rate of job-number change between 1/2010-2/2010 was +0.371%.
Next, let’s compare that to the “seasonally-adjusted” job-number change for the same time frames. In January 2008, there were 137,941,000 “seasonally-adjusted” jobs, with a drop of 50,000 “seasonally-adjusted” jobs in February 2008, for a rate of job-number change between 1/2008-2/2008 of -0.0362%. In January 2010, there were 129,562,000 “seasonally-adjusted” jobs, with a drop of 36,000 “seasonally-adjusted” jobs in February 2010, for a rate of job-number change between 1/2010-2/2010 of -0.0278%.
In short, despite what the chattering class says, the jobs market is not even at the point where it was near the “start” of the recession, much less its average between 2004 and 2008. Indeed, there were fewer jobs in February 2010 than there were in any other February since at least 2000 (note; the BLS statistics I’m relying on only go back to 1/2000).
To be fair, I do have to note that the February low in the 2000’s happened in 2003, when there were 128,660,000 actual (non-adjusted) jobs, and that month’s 412,000 improvement from January 2003 was weaker. However, unlike 2003, the immediate-future tax and regulatory climate is much worse now.
Revisions/extensions (3:00 pm 3/5/2010) – Corrected part of the quoted post from Tom since he corrected it on BizzyBlog.
