by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
How it is possible that initial claims for jobless benefits have been exactly the same for five of the past six weeks? As Jim Blanco has pointed out, there is no way that this is statistically possible. Honestly, I don’t know any other way to explain this other than to say that the numbers are being cooked. It appears that the bureaucrats in Washington have gotten so lazy that they aren’t even bothering to change the fake numbers that they are giving us. Even though large companies are conducting mass layoffs all over America, week after week we are given laughable numbers that indicate that everything is just fine. At this point, the charade has become such a farce that even CNBC has published an article about this…
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Calling the state of the U.S. jobs market these days stable seems like an understatement considering the latest data coming out of the Labor Department.
That’s because most of the past several weeks have shown that first-time claims for unemployment benefits haven’t fluctuated at all — as in zero.
For five of the past six weeks, the level of initial jobless filings totaled exactly 212,000. Given a labor force that is 168 million strong, achieving such stasis seems at least unusual if not uncanny, yet that is what the figures released each Thursday morning since mid-March have shown.
Jim Bianco, the head of Bianco Research, was the first one to call attention to the absurdity of getting the exact same number for five of the past six weeks…
“How is this statistically possible? Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number,” market veteran Jim Bianco, head of Bianco Research, posted Thursday on X.
“Initial claims for unemployment insurance are state programs, with 50 state rules, hundreds of offices, and 50 websites to file. Weather, seasonality, holidays, and economic vibrations drive the number of people filing claims from week to week,” he added. “Yet this measure is so stable that it does not vary by even 1,000 applications a week.”
He is right.
Something definitely does not smell right about all of this.
Below is the number of initial filings for unemployment insurance.
How is this statistically possible?
Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number.
Effectively the same number in the last 11 weeks, except for the holiday weeks (President’s Day and Easter).
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Consider… pic.twitter.com/vZbWWC7DRr— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) April 18, 2024
Of course it isn’t just for the past few months that we have been given fishy numbers.
For a couple of years, jobless claims have stayed within a certain range no matter what has been happening in the real economy.
I simply do not have any faith in the official numbers that they give us any longer, and I don’t understand how anyone else can either.
According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of announced job cuts in the U.S. in March was 7 percent higher than the already elevated level that we witnessed in February…
Employers in the U.S. announced 90,309 job cuts in March — a 7% increase from February, according to data released Thursday from executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
That amount of planned layoffs mark the highest monthly total since January 2023, when employers announced 102,943 cuts. Companies are cutting jobs as a result of store closures, bankruptcies, organizational restructuring or general cost-cutting, Challenger said. The cuts suggest that “many companies appear to be reverting to a ‘do more with less’ approach,” Senior Vice President Andy Challenger said in a statement.
“While technology continues to lead all industries so far this year, several industries, including energy and industrial manufacturing, are cutting more jobs this year than last,” he said.
But all of these layoffs haven’t even made a blip in the initial jobless claims numbers.
How is that possible?
And the BLS says that the unemployment rate actually went down in February…
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday showed the labor market added 303,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in March, significantly more than the 214,000 expected by economists. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate decreased to 3.8% from 3.9% in February.
If the unemployment rate in the U.S. really was just 3.8 percent, I would certainly be celebrating.
But that is another number that is so manipulated that it has essentially become meaningless.
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