JOBLESS NUMBERS REMAIN ABOVE 400K, but some are asking questions about the steady upward revision of past weeks’ numbers:

When we discussed last week’s intiial claims number we said, “In today’s weekly dose of BS from the BLS, we get the previous week’s massive beat of 401K revised to 405K, cutting the 410K estimate beat in half. But what is important is that the expectation for this week of 405K was once again “massively beaten” by a whopping 1K at 404K. Of course, next week this number will be revised to 408K meaning the consensus was missed but no robots will care.” Sure enough, last week’s beat was enough for 5 ES points. And even surer enough, we were spot on: last week’s 404K “beat” was just revised to a 409K “miss.” As for this week’s soon to be revised upward number, it came at 403K, missing expectations of 400K, but sure enough, suddenly a “much better” number than last week’s revised 409K. Just how dumb does the BLS think everyone is? The bottom line is that claims continue to be persistently higher than 400K.

I’ve noticed the revision bit myself.

UPDATE: Is going to Hell in a handbasket more slowly the new “improvement?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Carter emails: “Have been tracking those revisions as well. My numbers show the last 26 weeks have had an average revision of up 3,884 with no downward revisions and only one revision of zero. Talk about lying with statistics.”

It’s hard to trust anything from these guys lately.