The Unexpected Week Makes the Month Unexpected

I was a little more snide than I ought to have been while responding, on April 15, to an AP article about an unexpected increase in the number of new unemployment claims. My hints that the Providence Journal only ran the piece because it was bad news have been made less justified by the paper's running a more sunny piece this week:

Employers added 288,000 jobs to their payrolls in April as the nation's unemployment rate slipped to 5.6 percent, reinforcing hopes for a sustained turnaround in the jobs market that had lagged for so long.

Payrolls have risen now for eight straight months, with 867,000 new jobs created so far this year, the Labor Department reported Friday. The strengthening jobs market comes just in time to aid President Bush's re-election efforts, which were in question a few months ago based on his economic record.

Bush is on track to be the first president since the Great Depression to have lost jobs under his watch. But the hiring gains in recent months have shrunk those losses to about 1.5 million.

One mitigating factor, for my part, is that the previous piece reported an unexpected weekly change:

The increase was far above the rise of 7,000 that economists had been expecting, but analysts cautioned against reading too much into a single week's change in the volatile series. Labor Department analysts noted that the period covered was the first week in a new quarter, a time when the jobless claims can be even more volatile.

Whereas the current piece notes an unexpected monthly change:

Revisions to payrolls also showed a stronger jobs market than previously reported. Last month's 308,000 payroll gains were revised up to 337,000. April's showing surprised analysts, who had expected payrolls of about 180,000 to 200,000.

I'm still not sure whether the Projo runs weekly updates, and as the monthly view shows, they don't appear to be particularly useful. Still, hopefully the improving job market will lift my baseline mood enough to temper my suspicions.