Saturday 3 November 2007

US economy in good shape for the time being

That seems to be what yesterday's data show.

MarketWatch reports the employment data:

Shaking off fears about weakness in housing and credit, the U.S. economy created 166,000 net jobs in October, the best job growth since May, the Labor Department reported Friday...

The unemployment rate was steady at 4.7% as expected, the government said.

The household survey, however, showed a loss of 250,000 workers, the third decline in the past four months.

And, as usual, watch for the revisions. Note that the revisions on the August data now surpass the magnitude by which the October number exceeded the consensus number.

MarketWatch also reports that factory orders rose 0.2 percent in September.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once you understand how this number is *calculated* you may change your opinion.

http://www.europac.net/externalframeset.asp?from=home&id=10627

lim said...

From your link, I assume the number you're referring to is the GDP number. But I covered that on Thursday.

This post is on the employment data. Not that there aren't problems with this number either, as I alluded to in the post.

Anonymous said...

My bad. Both three letter acronyms for government economic stats that suffer from the same problem: fuzzy math.

Here's my NFP authority...

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2007/11/cyclical-jobs-r.html

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