Courtesy of Mish.
The payroll report tomorrow is going to be interesting. The discrepancy between what Gallup reports and the BLS reports is widening.
Last month, the BLS reported the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate at 7.4%.
Today Gallup reported Unadjusted unemployment climbs to 8.7% (The seasonally adjusted rate is 8.6%).
Even if there is a huge jump of half a percentage point in unemployment, there will still be a major difference of opinion as to what the rate is.
Here are some charts and discussion from the Gallup report.
The U.S. Payroll to Population employment rate (P2P), as measured by Gallup, dropped to 43.7% in August, from 44.6% in July, and is down from 45.3% in August 2012.
Gallup’s P2P metric estimates the percentage of the U.S. adult population aged 18 and older who are employed full time by an employer for at least 30 hours per week. P2P is not seasonally adjusted.
August marks the seventh month this year that the P2P rate failed to improve over the same month in 2012. In fact, so far this year, P2P has declined an average of 0.3 percentage points in terms of monthly year-over-year changes. That is a reversal from last year, when 11 out of 12 months showed year-over-year increases in P2P and there was an average 0.8-point increase for the year.
Unemployment Rises to 8.7% in August
Gallup’s unadjusted unemployment rate for the U.S. workforce was 8.7% in August, up from 7.8% in July and from 8.1% in August 2012. Similar to P2P, unemployment fluctuates seasonally, and the year-over-year change is the most informative comparison. The uptick in unemployment this August compared with August of last year is the first year-over-year increase since Gallup was able to begin tracking yearly changes in 2011….
