More on the Unemployment Report

Microposted Monday, February 08 2010

I read a few good posts over the weekend on the new unemployment data released last Friday. David Leonhardt, who writes some great economy pieces for the NY Times, pointed out that the 3 month rolling job loss numbers show real improvement that might be lost in the monthly volatility. Check out the the chart in his Economix blog post.

CR also looked at the BLS data and reviewed the relationship between the unemployment rate and jobs. In short, they are two different surveys that sometimes diverge in the short term but align over the long term. Similar to David, CR looks at longer rolling periods to show that the two metrics move together when we stretch out the measurement period.

Related: Unemployment Data