“For some reason, October is the month with the largest seasonal adjustment down in jobs”

oooh wonder why? Perhaps it could be that October is the month in which a new year’s graduate intake enters the workforce?? And so if only 80,000 jobs were added, this implies that a substantial proportion of that graduate intake did not actually find a job and remains on the unemployment rolls?

“there is no way I can think of to test whether the seasonal adjustments are reliable”

of course! no way at all! because these numbers are just made up out of thin air by the BLS, perhaps by throwing darts at a board! Seasonal adjustment is just some sort of funny Freakonomics stuff with no basis in statistical fact!

Every single recession brings with it a late autumn crop of people who have discovered seasonal adjustment for the first time and use the autumn seasonals to claim that “really” things are going better. It is followed by the apring/summer crew of permabears using the positive seasonals to claim that the government is covering up how bad things really are. The one follows the other with a regularity which is, well, seasonal.

Calculated Risk at least provided some new perspective on the issue when it commented on the not-very-helpful musings by Norris. What did we get from the Felix the Fisherman? Nothing but by-catch.