Japan's Odd Labor Report

Posted on Thursday, October 1, 2009

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Bloomberg reports:

Japan's unemployment rate unexpectedly retreated in August from a postwar record.

The jobless rate fell to 5.5 percent from a record 5.7 percent in July, the statistics bureau said today in Tokyo. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for an increase to 5.8 percent.

"It's still too early" to say the worst is over for Japan's workers, said Masamichi Adachi, senior economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Tokyo. "Companies still have too many employees and too much capacity."

While unemployment did slide from 5.7% to 5.5% on a seasonally adjusted basis, it was flat non-seasonally adjusted at 5.4%. But it was odd and one should be skeptical of any single data point that is odd. Here is the oddness...