Moments after today's Microsoft record layoff announcement we tweeted the following:
This week's initial jobless claims seasonal adjustment factor will be epic
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 17, 2014 [3]
Once again we were spot on.
Because as the DOL just reported, yet again the fate of the US economy is left to seasonal adjustments. Non-seasonally-adjusted initial jobless claims surged over 47,000 this week to its worst in 6-months. But by the magic of PhD adjustment, this translated into 3,000 seasonally-adjusted drop from last week, beating expectations and printing near 'recovery' cycle lows. We can only imagine the adjustments needed to cope with Microsoft's layoffs. 2014 has seen the smallest percentage drop in initial claims since the crisis began.
Initial Claims raw data: non-seasonally-adjusted - not exactly the picture of health.
[4]
But ignore that and focus on seasonally-manipulated data.
[5]
To be clear, real initial claims are soaring but the magical data released to the public is dropping...
[6]
Charts: Bloomberg
