Illegal Immigration and Crime

What the stats actually say.

Economists are skeptical of new inflation numbers

Thursday saw the release of a much lighter-than-expected consumer price report for November, breaking from the recent trend of sticky inflation.

Stocks jumped. Yields fell. Odds of a Federal Reserve rate increased.

And many economists scratched their heads.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the consumer price index had an annual inflation rate of 2.7% last month, while core CPI — a measure that excludes volatile food and energy prices — was even lower at 2.6%. Both were below what economists had been estimating, as those polled by Dow Jones called for an annual headline rate of 3.1% and a rate on core CPI of 3%.

The November data release Thursday was delayed by 8 days because of the U.S. government shutdown, but more importantly, the October data was canceled, leaving it to the BLS to make certain methodological assumptions about the prior month’s inflation levels.

Those assumptions in the methodology were not clear to economists and were not fully explained in the release.

“The downside surprise reflects weakness in both goods and services, but may be partly due to methodological issues. The BLS might have carried forward prices in some categories, effectively assuming 0% inflation,” Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley, said in a note, deeming the November reading as “noisy” in a way that’s “difficult to draw strong conclusions.”

“If these technical factors are the main source of weakness, we could see reacceleration in December,” Gapen added.

Read the rest here.

Not saying that they are cooking the numbers. But this report has raised a lot of eyebrows. And it's worth remembering that Trump fired the last head of BLS after an unfavorable jobs report. 

California: The Great Exodus

For decades after World War II, California was a destination for Americans in search of a better life. In many people’s minds, it was the state with more jobs, more space, more sunlight, and more opportunity. They voted with their feet, and California grew spectacularly (its population increased by 137 percent between 1960 and 2010). However, this golden age of migration into the state is over. For the past two decades, California has been sending more people to other American states than it receives from them. Since 1990, the state has lost nearly 3.4 million residents through this migration.

This study describes the great ongoing California exodus, using data from the Census, the Internal Revenue Service, the state’s Department of Finance, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and other sources. We map in detail where in California the migrants come from, and where they go when they leave the state. We then analyze the data to determine the likely causes of California’s decline and the lessons that its decline holds for other states.

The data show a pattern of movement over the past decade from California mainly to states in the western and southern U.S.: Texas, Nevada, and Arizona, in that order, are the top magnet states. Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah follow. Rounding out the top ten are two southern states: Georgia and South Carolina.

Read the rest here.
HT: Bill (aka The Godfather)

Some good news on jobs with lots of qualifiers

Some companies are hiring, especially retailers.  But a lot of the new jobs are temp positions and even those that are full time  pay very low wages.  In raw numbers the official unemployment rate fell to 8.6%.  The real unemployment rate remains near 16%.  A significant factor in the decline of the official rate is that many of the long term unemployed have lost benefits and are no longer tracked by the system.  Once you lose your unemployment benefits you are no longer counted as jobless.  Huge numbers of the long term unemployed have simply given up and stopped looking for work.  These people do not figure into any government statistics.

In short, what the numbers show is less a recovery in jobs than a contraction in the number of people that the Labor Department keeps track of.  All of which is not to say no real jobs were added.  Some were.  But not nearly enough to move an accurate statistical measurement by any meaningful degree.