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  • 3 hours ago
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00:00All statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the best data provider in the entire world.
00:06And all data have gotten noisier over time because people don't like filling out surveys anymore.
00:13I don't know if they ever did, but now nobody will answer their phone.
00:17And so things have gotten noisier.
00:19And so what we did, and we have developed it over a series of months, is take 11 different data sources, some of them official statistics that come from the government, a bunch from the private sector, combine them all into generating these three statistics.
00:40One is a real-time now cast projection of what will be the unemployment rate the next time it's announced.
00:50If there is a government shutdown and this Friday they can't announce the unemployment rate, we're going to be feeling pretty good that we've developed this methodology to use all what statistics are out there to kind of give us a read of where we think unemployment is as of that moment.
01:07But then also the hiring rate among the unemployed and the layoff and other job separations rate of people who have a job.
01:20Because at moments like right now where weird things are happening in immigration and on labor supply that make it hard to interpret the monthly number of jobs created as an indicator of where you are in the business cycle,
01:37we saw in previous times when we've kind of had the same issues that these rates were a more accurate indicator of the business cycle.
01:49And the unemployment rate, the hiring rate, the layoff rate, the vacancy rate, those are kind of like the four horsemen of truth and justice in the labor market.
01:59Mostly they say, so that was a backdrop, the short version of what they say is much more steady, little bit cooling, but pretty steady.
02:12And that looks different than the monthly payroll number, which dropped quite a lot and got people agitated.
02:19But I just caution folks, don't over-index on a number that you know there are a bunch of problems with that number as a business cycle indicator when immigration is moving.
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