It's Jobless Thursday

The number of initial claims, 292,000, sounds good, but there were problems with the statistics:

Initial jobless claims fell to their lowest level last week since the spring of 2006, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Or not.

The reported figure, which estimated that jobless claims had dropped to 292,000, about 31,000 fewer than the week before, seemingly suggested that the economy was finally entering a self-sustaining recovery on the back of a healing job market.

The number, however, is unreliable, the government said, skewed by upgrades on two state computer systems that caused those states to underreport claims. The total number of initial jobless claims is almost certainly higher than reported, though nobody knows the scope of the mismeasurement at this point.

The data malfunction has called into question the accuracy of a major leading indicator, one scrutinized by investors, economists and policy makers alike. It also shined a light on the imperfect and often outdated systems that states and the federal government use to provide benefits to workers and cull data on the labor market and the broader economy — a situation that some experts warn might become even worse because of the $1 trillion in budget cuts spread over 10 years known as sequestration.

The Labor Department would not confirm which two states had issues or guess as to the scope of the mismeasurement. But Nevada confirmed that it had not reported complete claims data to the federal government because of a computer upgrade.

So basically, the numbers won't mean anything until next week, when the revision comes in.

The shortened Labor Day week probably skewed the numbers too, or at least made it harder for Nevada and a state to be named at a later date to get their act together with regard to the computer update..