Happy New Year -- 2019 -- Beware Of Those Seasonal Swings -- Throws Off The Data

Link here. After many paragraphs of gloom and doom, one finally gets to this in the Reuters article at the link:

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 216,000 for the week ended December 22, 2018, the Labor Department reported. 

Initial claims have now fallen in three of the last four weeks and are just above the 49-year low of 202,000 reached in the week ended September 15, 2018.

After several years of near-steady falls, claims trended higher between mid-September and mid-December, prompting concern the U.S. economy was losing momentum.

It remains unclear how much of that increase was related to the difficulty government statisticians have in adjusting the claims data for seasonal swings. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims increasing to 217,000 in the latest week. 

You can go to the link to see how Reuters interprets the data.

Ah, yes, "difficulty adjusting the claims data for seasonal swings." Seasonal swings. Is that something new for the government statisticians? LOL. But those same government statisticians know to the 100th-degree what the earth's global temperature will be one hundred years from now. The science is settled.