Snowstorms may cause jobs report to be bleak

March 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The February jobs report to be released today is likely to be bleak.

Blame the weather, the White House says.

That’s because last month’s snowstorms are expected to have artificially inflated job losses by at least 100,000.

Not so fast, private economists counter. The report can’t just be dismissed. Once the snow effect is filtered out, they say the data will still signal weak hiring: Little if any job growth, and an unemployment rate predicted to rise to 9.8 percent or more from 9.7 percent.

Doubts about the February data have arisen because some people who didn’t make it to work because of snowstorms in the Eastern United States weren’t paid. So they won’t be included in the government’s payroll calculations. The Obama administration has pre-emptively pointed to the weather to explain a poor jobs report.

“The blizzards that affected much of the country during the last month are likely to distort the statistics,” Larry Summers, a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, said in an interview on CNBC.

Still, private economists say they should be able to separate out the impact of weather. They think that will help isolate the underlying job trends.

“There will be a lot of valuable information about the job market in the report ... not just weather-related noise,” said Zach Pandl, an economist at Nomura Securities.

That said, Pandl and other economists think the February data will be viewed with some skepticism because some of the figures won’t be as precise as usual.

“It will be very hard to see the signal from the noise in the February employment report,” said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers. Still, his firm predicts the snowstorms will inflate the reported job losses by an extra 150,000 to 220,000.

Last month’s severe weather happened to occur just before the week when the government surveyed companies on their payroll levels for February.