Thursday, January 08, 2009

Place Your Bets

Jobs report comes out tomorrow. I always take the under bet, meaning I'm betting the number is under (including more negative) the "consensus" estimate, which is currently at -500K.

Because people occasionally confuse the weekly new jobless claims numbers with the monthly jobs report, remember they measure different things. The new jobless claims is about new people filing for unemployment, the monthly jobs report, derived from 2 different surveys, is about estimating the change in total number of jobs, along with various measures of the unemployment rate.