The shock of Friday’s U.S. jobs report is still rippling through economic circles, politics and financial markets.
The 2.5 million increase in payrolls and decline in the unemployment rate -- albeit to a still-sky-high 13.3% -- confounded expectations for another sharp deterioration in both measures.
Beyond how economists flubbed the forecasts, the report has spurred many other questions, from how to reconcile the figures with jobless-claims numbers showing about 9 million more claiming unemployment insurance benefits, to what to make of a recurring data-collection issue by the Labor Department, to how many jobs the federal Paycheck Protection Program actually saved.
Below, we try to answer some of these questions:
Wait, so is the real unemployment rate 16%?
Kind of. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics detailed, survey-takers misclassified a lot of people -- around 5 million -- as employed but absent from work, rather than unemployed on temporary layoff. If you counted those people as unemployed, the jobless rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher on an unadjusted basis -- or about 16%.
The April report said the unemployment rate would have been almost 5 percentage points higher -- or approaching 20%. So both of these statements are true: the rate fell in May, and the real (unofficial) unemployment rate was higher than the given figure in both months.
The jobs report showed 21 million Americans unemployed, but the weekly jobless claims report said 30 million are claiming continuing unemployment benefits in all programs. What gives?
It’s not actually 21 million, even though that’s the official number. If you adjust the figures for the misclassification detailed above, the true number of unemployed is closer to 26 million or 27 million, according to Nick Bunker, an economic research director for the jobs website Indeed.
OK, so we’re still off by 3 million or 4 million. What explains the rest of the gap?