BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, JUNE 6, 1997 __The nation's unemployment rate dropped in May to the lowest level in more than 23 years, adding to a rosy portrait of the U.S. economy that sent stock prices soaring to new records ....The report left unclear whether economic growth is slowing ....The number of payroll jobs rose by only a moderate 138,000, a number lower than many analysts had expected ....The number of payroll jobs added in April was revised to 323,000, more than twice the 142,000 estimated last month. However, a portion of that upward revision was due to technical statistical factors ....Katharine G. Abraham, commissioner of labor statistics, told a Joint Economic Committee hearing that the economic expansion is helping those who have been unemployed the longest. "The number of long-term unemployed -- those unemployed for 27 weeks or more --also has trended downward since the beginning of the year," Abraham said ....(Washington Post, June 7, page A1). __The tightest labor market in a generation got a notch tighter last month, as the unemployment rate fell to nearly a 24-year low while wages continued creeping upward. At the same time, the May employment report did little to answer the main question facing economic policy makers: Is the economy slowing sharply from the past six months of rapid growth? The number of jobs created -- considered a barometer for overall economic activity -- did drop last month from April. But that may have been a temporary dip resulting mainly from a new seasonal-adjustment formula ....Wages are moving up, albeit modestly. The 3.8 percent year-over-year increase continued a pattern throughout 1997, in which pay increases "have been running higher than during the same period in 1996," BLS Commissioner Abraham told Congress Friday ....(Wall Street Journal, page A2). The Wall Street Journal's feature "Tracking the Economy" (page A6) predicts that the May Producer Price Index for Finished Goods, to be released Friday, will increase 0.2 percent, in contrast to the April decrease of 0.6 percent. The Washington Post devoted a full page in its Sunday "Outlook" section to "A Look at Racial Identity," with two views about the place of race in the gathering of census information. BLS disputes the extent of CPI inaccuracy, says a Reuters News Agency report carried by the Washington Times (June 7, page C14). BLS conceded on Friday that its key CPI overstates inflation, but by less than the 1.1 percentage points estimated by an independent panel. The Reuters story calls a paper prepared for the JEC "a formal response to the Boskin Commission study released last December" and says that BLS researchers specifically dismissed about half of the 1.1-point estimate and said that much of the other half could not be estimated. "I have to caution you, there is a great deal of uncertainty about the other pieces," said Kenneth Dalton, BLS associate commissioner for prices and living conditions. Dalton and other BLS officials presented their response ... at a hearing Friday of the JEC. BLS charged the Boskin commission with making numerous inaccurate inferences, based on faulty or incomplete data. "The BLS specifically rejects several of the estimated ... biases, in cases where the commission presented new evidence," the study's authors said. Dalton agreed that the failure to account for consumers switching among products when prices shift artificially boosts the CPI by about 0.4 percent a year. But the BLS paper questioned several other Boskin conclusions, saying that the answers in many cases simply cannot be determined ....The BLS findings appear to affirm Congress' decision not to mandate reduced inflation calculations in a resolution to balance the federal budget passed earlier this spring .... The Washington Times' "Washington Business" section tells its readers about "FEDSTATS," the new Web page created by the Federal Interagency Council on Statistical Policy (includes BLS). The address is http://www.fedstats.gov. This site provides statistics in more than 275 categories from more than 70 agencies. This "extremely user-friendly site ... takes full advantage of the World Wide Web's capabilities to provide reports of public interest, which are presented in a format that is easy to scan or search" ....
