New jobs created in Labor Dept. imagination

[daa]

May 11, 2004 -- DON'T get too excited about all those new jobs that were supposed to have been created in April.
I'm not going to waste a lot of my precious space on this, but the bottom line is that most of the 288,000 jobs that the Labor Department says were created last month may not really exist.

They could be figments of statisticians' optimism.

Anyone who plodded through my column last Thursday knows I predicted that job growth in April would be better than the 160,000 to 170,000 jobs that the "pros" were anticipating.

But I also said, quite emphatically I hope, that the stronger growth would be an illusion - the result of the Labor Department's computers making happy predictions about seasonal job creation that could neither be verified nor justified.

I'll explain one aspect.

Back in the March employment report, the government added 153,000 positions to its revised total of 337,000 new jobs because it thought (but couldn't prove) loads of new companies were being created in this economy.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

http://www.nypost.com/business/23936.htm

[Kolesar]

1. The GOP pundits needed something to crow about for the weekend

This looks "made to order" for the weekend political talk shows. What a fortunate coincidence !

[Moderator]

2. daa

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