Daily Market Notes
The Labor Department Says 198,000. The Publisher Still Says 180K.
We published an impossible sentence yesterday and said we had not established the real figure. The Department of Labor's own release says the four-week claims average is 198,000 - exactly the number we derived from the publisher's own arithmetic. The publisher still says 180K, eighteen hours later, uncorrected. Three of the four numbers in that sentence are right at the issuer, which tells you the level was never computed from the base and the change sitting beside it. The continuing-claims thousand we refused to publish is closed too: it was a revised base.