Updated: Using Gas Prices to Forecast Unemployment

Good morning, White House Staffer!

Say, do you remember when we said you should enjoy it while you can as the average price of gasoline in the U.S. dropped below $3.50 per gallon back in June?

Summer’s over dude, and has been for well over a month!

Although your boss’ spokesman is chillin’ from his job (such strange behavior with the national election less than six weeks away, but what should we expect when the boss himself has been phoning it in all this time!), maybe you should have spent more time working on real, non-election-related stuff for the last four months, because gas prices in the U.S. have spiked sharply upward. Again.

So, to help you better understand why you really don’t want that to happen, we’ve updated our tool that allows you to roughly forecast what today’s high gas prices will mean for tomorrow’s soon-to-come unemployment rate in the U.S. Basically, we’ve incorporated all the available data through September 2012 and accounted for inflation through that month as well.

Just for fun, you should try this exercise using yesterday’s average price of gasoline in California, $4.67.

“Good Morning, White House Staffer” is a special feature we run periodically whenever the average U.S. national retail price for gasoline rises above $3.50 per gallon!

2012-10-10 07:28:18

Source: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/10/updated-using-gas-prices-to-forecast.html