Unemployment Prediction for June
June 25th, 2010Well, it’s about that time again, so here’s my unemployment prediction for June. Actually, all the data for the prediction was in a week and a half ago, but my 3 year old decided he’d keep me busy instead - ok with me!
By the way, for each monthly prediction I plan to compare against the consensus forecast published on the Market Watch website. It will be interesting to see if my predictions, derived from only a single dataset (Gallup Poll Data), will be competitive with the consensus forecasts of multiple analysts with multiple sources. It turns out that last month my prediction of 9.7% (see blog “Unemployment Improving?“) hit the actuals of 9.7% exactly. The Market Watch published consensus forecast was 9.8%, off by only 0.1 percentage points, so we were both pretty close or on the mark that time.
Next month (June forecast) will be more interesting, as the consensus is coming in right now at 9.7%, and my model predicts 9.5%. I’ve been hearing a lot of reports of how the US census is pulling back employment, and this could make the unemployment rate for June not look so good -> which goes against my prediction. BUT if that were so, the result should be reflected to some extent in the polling and therefore the model, although the polling does not capture how many people are being hired/let go. So we’ll see. Right now it’s an interesting experiment.