Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Quick note while working 

I am writing the new Quarterly Business Report and again unable to blog much today. (People at the Times are waiting, and I know they are reading here to check if I'm playing hooky.) But while working on this I noticed something that we've talked about on the blog. When state economist Tom Stinson first came forward to say the state was in a recession, he was quoted as saying
"We should normally add somewhere around 23,000 jobs or a little bit more just to keep up with labor market growth," Stinson said. Instead, the year-over-year job total fell by 700.
Last week DEED reported a revision of the number of jobs in Minnesota to a gain of 15,300 from January 2007 to January 2008. Most of these jobs came from revision of the previous data. This isn't booming growth by any stretch of the imagination, but it puts Minnesota quite close to the national average. I wonder if that revision makes him a little less certain of his recession forecast. It would for me. The revisions in the St. Cloud data are equally profound.

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