Jobs data is too old – we are in a new world

THE past is a different country and nothing more emphatically announces that than the ‘latest’ official ABS jobs and jobless numbers.

First off and very importantly, although they are ‘for December’, they are not as at the end of the month or even averaged over the month, but cover only the first two weeks.

In short, bluntly, they tell us about the jobs situation as it was – more accurately, might have been – in an economy, even though just five or six weeks ago, that’s now disappeared into the dustbin of history.

This is also at the best of times, with the retail trade in the first few weeks of December smack in the middle of the boom running from Black Friday through to Boxing Day and across New Year.

The normal state of ‘desperately seeking workers’ – and betting the bank on a hoped-for consumer spending binge – has been dramatically leveraged up by the continuing post-Covid impacts on everything, but especially on jobs, jobseekers and existing workers.

With, further, the way we really only now are entering the first stages of the surge in migrant numbers. It’s bringing desperately needed workers; it’s also adding to the ranks of job-seekers.

At the best of times, both the basic raw data and even more the seasonal adjustment is, how should I put it, ‘dodgy as all is’’.

This data purported to ‘tell us’ – all-too dutifully repeated, Dead Parrot-style, by first the market economists and then the mainstream media – that jobs surprisingly fell by 14,600 (against a projected 25,000 gain) but the jobless rate stayed unchanged at its 3.5 per cent 50-year low.

PM, fruitlessly and really quite pointlessly, please note. And that ‘other figure’, by the bye, is still the 3.1 per cent it was before Christmas.

In reality the numbers told us no such thing.

Indeed, even the ABS says that it’s only 95 per cent confident that the change in jobs was actually somewhere between a fall of 78,400 and an increase of 49,200. And the jobless rate could have been anywhere between 3.3 and 3.7 per cent.

Just savour that for a moment.

We could actually have had 78,000 jobs disappearing into the Christmas peak retail season: hmm, come in recession. And maybe coming rate cuts from the Reserve Bank.

Or we could have had 49,000 created. And maybe the RBA switching back to 50 point rate hikes.

Or even indeed – the 5 per cent possibility – that jobs losses could have been more than 78,000; and alternatively job gains could have been more than 49,000

We will of course find out in ‘due course’ – with that first RBA meeting in three weeks, and more relevant and more recent evidence on just what’s happening with the economy.

Ours and ‘everyone else’s’, but especially the US and China.

I might add that the ABS (and most everybody else) is using both probability analysis and seasonal adjustment techniques that have long been rendered utterly obsolete by all the changes in the global economy – globalisation, China, computerisation, online activity and so on.

And then add Covid and then the post-Covid recovery, adjustments and disruptions; and our statistics are beginning to look like Down Under versions of the Chinese ones; albeit nowhere near as ‘prompt’.

Interestingly, on a related front, a funny thing happened on the way to the (virtual reality) bourse Thursday morning.

Local investors woke up to the news that Wall St had plunged more than 600 points and just yawned. Our market closed up 40 points – and it was not on the basis of futures trading pointing to Wall St immediately backtracking coming up Thursday night.

Again, we shall see in ‘due course’ who was right – kicking off with those seven days in February.