Incredible news today

The unemployment numbers today were truly incredible, and I mean that in the original sense of the word: not credible. The number of people out of work went up; the number on unemployment went up; the number on emergency unemployment went up; the number who ran out of even emergency unemployment went up, but the unemployment rate went down. That's silly.

Two things were at work here. One is the thing I mentioned several weeks ago where they suddenly changed the methodology for counting the unemployed and began systematically over-counting while times were bad. Then they said, "Oops. Sorry about that. We'll go back to normal in February." So they got to save up unemployed people so they could "correct the problem" and reduce unemployment at a convenient time.

The other thing at play is this game where hundreds of thousands of people run out of emergency benefits, so the government says, "Well, we don't have to worry about counting them anymore." They are counted in U6 unemployment, but not the ridiculous U3, which I call the "wouldn't it be nice" unemployment number.

Article about unemployment numbers by analyst Mike Shedlock

Article about the administration's pyramid scheme.