Personal Dork Assistant

Most Misleading News Story of the Day

Hooray! Unemployment is down, and factory production is up. The economy has gotta be improving now, right? Um, not so fast. Checking the small print:

The jobless rate slid to 6.2 percent last month from 6.4 percent, the Labor Department said. However, that decline was caused by an exodus of job-hunters from the labor force, not by any surge in hiring.

Yeah, having 556,000 people give up on finding a job should be a real shot-in-the-arm. Oh, overall payroll was reduced, too, by 44,000 jobs (71,000 in manufacturing alone). On the other hand, personal income rose by 0.3%, and factory activity is up. Sounds consistent with the offshore-outsourcing (loss of jobs) and wealth-concentration (rising average income despite more unemployed people) trends. Of course, one month's data is insufficient to determine any sort of trend, but I do love it when the numbers come together, even if it's just a random fluctuation.