Excerpting some key paragraphs:
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When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.
The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May.
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Some took this as a sign that President Trump or one of his staffers may have tinkered with the data to make it look better, especially since most forecasters predicted the unemployment rate would be close to 20 percent in May, up from 14.7 percent in April. But economists and former BLS leaders from across the political strongly dismissed that idea.
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Economists say the BLS was trying to be as transparent as possible about how hard it is to collect real-time data during a pandemic. The BLS admitted that some people who should have been classified as “temporarily unemployed” during the shutdown were instead misclassified as employed but “absent” from work for “other reasons.”
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This problem started in March when there was a big jump in people claiming they were temporarily “absent” from work for “other reasons.” The BLS noticed this and flagged it right away. In March, the BLS said the unemployment rate likely should have been 5.4 percent, instead of the official 4.4 percent rate. In April, the BLS said the real unemployment rate was likely about 19.7 percent, not 14.7 percent.
Economists said the big takeaway is that it’s hard to collect real-time data during a pandemic and that while the unemployment rate remains high — likely more than 16 percent — it has declined a little from April.
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Instead of focusing on possible Trump interference, many economists wish people would focus on the fact that 21 million Americans are currently unemployed and over 2 million have permanently lost their jobs.
The situation remains dire, they say, even after a few jobs returned in May as the economy reopened.
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Given that the NASDAQ hit an all-time high today (!) based largely on the unemployment number being better than expected, one wonders how the market will react to the correction on Monday.