CNN 2010-02-12

Boy, just when you thought the job situation couldn't get any worse, just moments ago, word of an unexpected jump in first-time jobless claims. The Labor 1 Department says new claims for unemployment insurance rose by 8,000 to 480,000. That's the fourth increase in just the past five weeks.

And if you think that's bad, it gets even worse. Government info coming out tomorrow may show job losses in this horrible recession were under counted by close to a million jobs.

Stephanie Elam joining us from New York.

So, Stephanie, where is this under counting info coming from?

Well, as -- it was coming from the government, Kyra. And it's for a lot of people out there, just people on main street, I'm sure they're going, yeah, no doubt. We knew this. This was a way worse recession when it came to jobs than a lot of people were saying.

So what's going on here is that they're looking at a period that started in April 2008 going through March of 2009. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics usually does this. They go back and they re-jigger the number a bit to find out what it was so saying that another 824,000 jobs were lost during that period.

That's more than the current estimates and the government's current reading is that during that period we lost 4.8 million jobs. So this revision would actually put us at 5.6 million jobs that would be lost during that period. So the largest revision in some 30 years.

Now the reason why they had to do this is because, as the monthly data was coming out, they're saying some information just was not available. Maybe someone started a job in the middle of the year, maybe a business went out of business during that period, and that all factors into those statistics.

So now they can take all that information and put it together and do this. Normally when they have to resize a number, it's a small change. But that 12-month period, Kyra, as you remember, was anything but normal. It was huge.

It was when we went to the brink 2 of another depression. So obviously because of that, it was an unusual situation. And that's why you see the number popped up there so much, so that would take us to a new estimate of a loss of about eight million jobs since the recession began which was in December 2007, so obviously a lot more pain out there than we realized we were dealing 3 with during the time.

We should talk a little bit more about what we expect from tomorrow's report.

Yes, tomorrow is the big jobs report. We'll get the January numbers.

I can tell you that the unemployment rate is expected to stay at 10 percent. However, as far as jobs being lost or added, analysts 4 expect that we should add 13,000 jobs, but I should point out that there's been a lot of discrepancy 5.

You've got one group saying that we actually should see -- slowing down in job losses. We have another report that says losses accelerated as far as jobs are concerned. So it's kind of all over the place when it comes to this jobs report. But the government will be out tomorrow morning and we will actually get to see the numbers and see what things look like for January.

But keep in mind, January of last year, we lost 741,000. So the idea of adding, I will say that would be putting us back into the right directions. Still not enough but still going in the right direction.

Got it. I just thought of something. Did I say you were at the New York Stock Exchange or did I say you were in New York?

I don't know, but I..I know it's confusing now. But I'm in New York.

Right. Exactly. I just want to make that point again. Because usually it's like that just got.. rolls off my tongue.

All right, Stephanie, appreciate it.