If you don't believe in the US Bureau of Labor statistics, then who do you believe? Sure they might be inaccurate, but they use the same methods and if you compare them from month to month, you still get the same variation. Remember, not everyone in those food lines are unemployed, the bottom 20% have a mean income of around $13k in 2018.I’ve checked my portfolio balance and it’s up a little bit since the hit earlier this year.
I have to respectfully disagree with the 7.9% unemployment number, it’s closer to 20%.
NAKs water mitigation plan for the mine was rejected.If there are any stock gurus here could you have a look at a mining stock called NAK.
Does this look like a good investment?
Looks a little risky to me but I'm not a stock person.
Thanks,
I might be biased as a small landlord's son. I do not trust the "unemployment" number, but rather the under employed. Even then the official number is not something I will trust.If you don't believe in the US Bureau of Labor statistics, then who do you believe? Sure they might be inaccurate, but they use the same methods and if you compare them from month to month, you still get the same variation. Remember, not everyone in those food lines are unemployed, the bottom 20% have a mean income of around $13k in 2018.
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If you don't understand bias, you probably believe in the Easter bunny also. All you provide is anecdotal evidence which is terribly unreliable. If you're homeless and hang out with other homeless, you'd think there's a big homeless problem. If you're an alcoholic or drug user and know many in the same social circle, your perception of the problem would be biased based on the company you keep. Similarly with unemployment, you may know many unemployed or under employed, but you're not really qualified to give an assessment of it because your assessment is based on local conditions.If you believe the government’s ‘official’ unemployment number..... you also believe in the Easter Bunny.
I never claimed that it was accurate. It is a big government agency and they have specific methodologies. It's understandable that people don't trust certain things. But I don't believe in blanket statements. If you don't trust the numbers, they're public information, you'd have to dig into them to tell me why they shouldn't be trusted. To just say that you can't trust them is being intellectually dishonest when you can't say why. Otherwise even if they use a flawed methodology, it's the same one so you can still use it to compare it from one era to the other. Just like a tire gauge that's off by 10 psi, once you know that, you can adjust for that. Just like the unemployment numbers are the official numbers and don't include underemployed and people who stopped looking. They never have.Wolf,
I was kidding around and I know you are a very smart person.
Never believe ANY information the government releases...... especially their statistics and data.
Just because something is measured doesn’t make the data accurate.
Imagine using a tire pressure gauge that is not accurate. You believe the PSI of all 4 of your tires is accurate, but in reality they are all off by 10 PSI. You then measure the tire pressure of your wife’s car thinking you did a good job.... but again the PSI is way off. Now imagine if you checked 10M tires, all your data is incorrect. You just have lots of worthless data.
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I never claimed that it was accurate. It is a big government agency and they have specific methodologies. It's understandable that people don't trust certain things. But I don't believe in blanket statements. If you don't trust the numbers, they're public information, you'd have to dig into them to tell me why they shouldn't be trusted. To just say that you can't trust them is being intellectually dishonest when you can't say why. Otherwise even if they use a flawed methodology, it's the same one so you can still use it to compare it from one era to the other. Just like a tire gauge that's off by 10 psi, once you know that, you can adjust for that. Just like the unemployment numbers are the official numbers and don't include underemployed and people who stopped looking. They never have.
I don't think that makes any sense though. The US unemployment numbers excludes those classes on purpose as it's hard to measure.The bigger reason I don't trust it in the US is that they do not measure people who are not actively looking (gave up), never found their first job (new grad), in and out of employment (part time working), or working but only making insufficient amount of income (under employed).
Wolf,
There‘s definitely a lot more unemployed folks in the USA than being reported.
I don’t want to get this thread shut down..... but it’s NOT normal for 25,000 people (6000 vehicles) to show up at a food bank in Dallas 2 weeks ago and waiting a few hours in line to get a box of food to feed their family.
It’s going to get very bad once the evictions / foreclosures begin and the courts allow people to get kicked of of their place of shelter. Lots of big industries are affected by the illness and many of those jobs are not coming back soon.
Some people just don’t understand how bad things are going to get in the very near future.
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Correct. I still look at it but I do not use unemployment number primarily for any decision making. They won't tell you if someone got a pay cut, turned part time, lost their health insurance, or have to move back to their parents. Typically road traffic or market rent paint a much better picture on those early on (mortgage delinquent would be next but will lag for a while). Of course, currently we cannot use road traffic as an indicator, but things like rent is always the better way to judge people's confidence / affordability.I don't think that makes any sense though. The US unemployment numbers excludes those classes on purpose as it's hard to measure.
So you don't trust a number because it doesn't include things that they don't even claim to measure?