"Lucy

Lucille Ball

you got some splainin' to do" ...  In this case "Lucy" is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  We were greeted this morning with some encouraging employment numbers (see: LA Times Story).  In particular, this nation's unemployment rate has dropped to 8.3%.  As is my wont, I then went to the source data at the Bureau to see what was what (see: CPS Tables and click on the HTML version of the A-1 table under Monthly Household Data).  And what I found was puzzling ... the civilian noninstitutional population (a non-seasonally-adjusted number) increased by almost 1.7 million in the month of January alone.  This compares to an average increase throughout all of 2011 of around 140 thousand per month.  This makes the current figure over 12 times higher than what might be considered normal!  This is certainly an outlying statistical jump and needs to be explained if one is to understand (and maybe even trust) these new good unemployment numbers.

My guess -- perhaps it is the huge jump in foreign nationals entering the U.S. to take jobs not given ... or maybe not even offered to U.S. citizens (see: Numbers USA) and this needs to be accounted for by the Bureau ... and it chose to do so all in the month of January.

And also please note the very large pop in the number of people who have left the labor force in January  ... almost 1.2 million versus an average of 215 thousand per month throughout 2011.  This is up by a factor of almost 6!  I find this too to be somewhat strange.

So, although the reported unemployment numbers do appear to be encouraging for our economic prospects, I am not doing cartwheels quite yet.