Story Comments

Really this is the very time for getting job also continue the job. Especially IT employees are suffering very much.

Yeah I was pleasantly surprised to see the a WSJ publication not being a douchebag. One thing I was hoping would be mentioned was the fact Shadowstats' methodology and data are 100% opaque (aka fabricated). There's plenty of real corruption and lying in our government that we should be focusing on. Why invent conspiracies where they don't exist?

Shadowstats is absolute f!*king bulls!*t. John Williams is a con artist. He doesn't even disclose the methodology or data that he uses to come up with his CPI. Which leads me to believe that he completely makes up the numbers. Whatever sells the most $175 subscrIptions I guess.

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-16-fuzzy-numbers True

Read the underlying BLS document referenced by the author - makes a good case for why Shadow Government Status arguments are bogus... http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/08/art1full.pdf

Basically true. You can't keep a confidence/ponzi game cooking w/o lotta lies.

See your problem is you're trying to use logic and reason, coupled with historical context. This will get you nowhere on reddit.com. Seriously you make an excellent point. Even were the unemployment number completely accurate, it doesn't give you useful information. If unemployment is 9.5%, but 80% of those are low wage workers, the effect on the overall economy is not great. If 50% of the unemployed make well over the median income, we have a problem.

The problem with Pollyanna Creep is that you don't get the proper economic signals in the size or timing necessary to assure "optimal" correction and response. You are effectively throwing out information. You get enough of that by using statistics but most economic decisions are already based on less information than ideal so this increases risks and losses.

Now now brjohnson789, you already answered enough questions. Let little P-F answer this time. Me: True!

I'm guessing this is sarcasm, but really the article is attempting to present facts in an unbiased way. It's sort of refreshing. And they certainly provide links for further info. I'm personally pretty tired of seeing "Real unemployment/inflation actually a billion percent, government lying!" on reddit. Questions on methodology are not black and white. If you're going to make any decisions based on government stats, you should read how they're calculated. The BLS publishes all of their methodology, it's pretty transparent. Although there was one factual error: Nixon pushed the BLS to calculate inflation using seasonally adjusted and non-adjusted, and then just pick the lower one. They never actually did this though.

I'm glad the author took the time to listen to the government's response to criticisms of their numbers, write that response down and then show it to me. A fine journalistic example.

"Pollyanna Creep"...now there's a phrase to make the reading worthwhile for that alone. The problem in stats for most people is twofold: they're constantly subject to revision; and the criteria for collection are always changing.

ooh, I know this one. True!

I am not an economist either but I can see the same picture. For what it is worth, I wrote an article and posted it on my website making the observations that the unemployment rate jumped .5%. The 345,000 reported figured would have only added .2% to the total unemployment. So where is the rest? The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the job losses for the month of May were 787,000. It is obvious that we cannot trust anymore the rosy picture that the government reports. In addition, the 9.4% unemployment reported is just under half of the U6 16.4%. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm Our debt is unpayable and the budget deficit unsustainable. It does not take an economist or a rocket scientist to see that. The Fed is just buying time and for that they need to build the people confidence and get them spending and deeper into debt. It appears that the people are not buying it and they are just going to sit and wait to see how all of this is going to unravel.

How if CPI-numbers where calculated in retrospect of the constantly(since the 60th´s) diluted food-production. In almost every food-article the original raw-product has been diluted with an synthetic product etc. Why do you ask yourself? Of course this is done to preserve profits when underlying prices tend to rise(worldpopulations is also always rising) along with other costs(i.e wage inflation, rents). So the consumers are constantly been rewarded by higher prices AND poorer product-quality. Still the BLS is not taking this in consideration. That´s really a BIG mistake. AND HEDONIC.

MP: Here's a link to my 7 January 2008 post. Read, then you decide: http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/01/oil-and-dollar.html.

I have been saying things like John Williams for decades. Look at the comic book index. 1957, 10 cents, now $2.29. The Hostess Twinkie Index, 1957 10 cents, now $1.39. The Pizza Index, 1957 15 cents, now $2.75. Etc., etc. By how much have prices risen since 1957?

You might want to take a peek at these numbers... http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1101-EMPIRICAL-PROOF-Obama-Stimulus-FAIL.html

Actually, I am always quick to note when somebody asks me what I think that anything could happen and I could be wrong. That said, I am on record as having called a trading bottom in the stock market a few days before the low in March. There is also the possibility that some parts of the economy could show some fleeting signs of life given all the money being being thrown at it by our government. Still, for reasons I have detailed in my last two books, I feel reasonably confident that we are far from THE bottom in both the stock market and the economy -- in terms of magnitude and time.