Wall Street Rant

So today the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released their monthly headline unemployment rate and it came down from their reported 13.3% in May to 11.1% in June. This is a continuation of the BS report I spoke about last month here.

While they admitted last month in the footnotes that the "overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported" if it weren't for a misclassification error, even with that correction 16.3% would have STILL been under-reporting unemployment. Based ONLY on those receiving unemployment benefits, the unemployment rate would have been 18.9% last month.

Interestingly they reported this month in the footnotes that the reported number would only be about 1% higher if they classified the survey responses correctly. However, as you can see below, this is blatant BS.....the official numbers are EVEN MORE out of wack this month. In fact, the overall unemployment rate has likely gone UP by nearly a percentage point since the last report.


As a reminder, the reported unemployment rate which was just released is based on a household survey which is taken around the middle of each month. That is why the latest date listed here is 6/13/2020 which represents the most recent finalized unemployment insurance figures.

So please tell me, how are they claiming the unemployment rate FELL 2.2% despite an additional 1,526,212 people on unemployment insurance?



Let's just continue to call this what it is. BS.