"Wildly Creative" employment report in the US [updated]

I am happy to see that I am not the only one to consider the figures coming out of the BLS as total rubish and see that actually quite few people seem to be concerned about the way employment figures are calculated by the BLS in the US.

I will just relay Mish's posts here. On the 5th of June 2008, he wrote:

Friday we get to see how creative the folks at the BLS get with their birth/death model. Whatever it is, the mainstream media is likely to put lipstick on a pig.

And we got the confirmation on the 6th of June's employment report, and Mish's comment:

Once again the BLS should be embarrassed to report this data. Its model suggests that there was 42,000 jobs coming from new construction businesses, 23,000 jobs coming from professional services, and a whopping 217,000 jobs in total coming from net new business creation. The economy has slowed to a standstill and the BLS model still has the economy expanding quite rapidly.
[...]
This report was the 6th consecutive disaster, and 5th consecutive contraction. Service jobs were only positive because 17,000 useless government jobs were created. Somehow we are supposed to believe the economy is not in recession.

For those unfamiliar with the way the BLS "counts" the number of unemployed people, and their death/birth model, you will learn a great bunch of things from Mish's post.


Here are some more figures, as found in "Employment Situation Worsening" by Anthony Cherniawski, The Practical Investor, LLC | June 9, 2008:

The CES Birth/Death Model added 217,000 hypothetical jobs in May, so the real number may have been –266,000 in May instead of the –49,000 enumerated by the BLS. According to the government statistics, we added 77,000 hypothetical leisure & Hospitality jobs and 42,000 hypothetical Construction jobs in the month of May. At the same time, those marginally attached to the workforce (seeking full-time work, but only employed part-time) increased in May.

In summary, the U.S. lost jobs for a fifth month and the unemployment rate rose by the most in more than two decades, as an influx of students into the workforce drove the biggest jump in teenage joblessness since at least 1948.