The biggest issue with the Household Survey is the seasonal adjustment (SA) process itself.
FORBES: Why Jack Welch Has A Point About Unemployment Numbers
No one I know has any idea as to how the BLS does this seasonal adjustment.
Here is the Department of Numbers series (which goes out to March) overlaid against the seasonal adjustment.
But in some situations the seasonal adjustment may go too far and give investors a distorted view.
If you're looking for grains of comfort, you could note that the seasonal adjustment was unusually high, even for June.
One reason is that seasonal adjustment is tricky in such countries where the shift from agriculture to industry changes the pattern of seasonality over time, says Mr Kroeber.
The scheme of seasonal adjustment was overcompensating for construction layoffs.
Retail jobs will be particularly hit given the concentration of those jobs in the Northeast and the seasonal adjustment that accounts for the increase in retail jobs ahead of the Holiday season.
FORBES: Don't Worry About Hurricane Sandy, November Jobs Number To Hit 145k, Nomura Says
This survey suffers from the same seasonal adjustment issues as the Household Survey except that BLS reports the current number (141, 000 SA for September) and the revised data from the immediate past two months.
FORBES: Why Jack Welch Has A Point About Unemployment Numbers
Seasonal adjustment is generally speaking a good thing, because seasonal changes definitely have an effect, and it is good that statisticians present their data in a way that takes out some of the seasonal variation.
My seasonal adjustment (hand tuned) suggested that the rate of inventory decline had not changed significantly in the last two years or so and that there was no particular reason to think it was changing right now.
It does not, however, appear that the seasonal adjustment scheme takes into account the fact that the most seasonal part of the economy is also the part that is much smaller than it was at the time that the seasonal adjustment factors were set.
My original handmade seasonal inventory adjustment is lost to the ages.
But the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers, which prepares the report with ADP, warned Wednesday that its estimate of December job growth might have been stronger than merited because of seasonal-adjustment problems specific to the ADP data set.
应用推荐