Mike Konczal at Rortybomb on February auto sales:

As auto sales per capita go up, unemployment goes down.  And we just saw a major jump in auto sales.  Eric Platt at Business Insider: ”As predicted by Business Insider, statistics firm Autodata Corp. is calling the February seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales at 15.1 million units for the U.S. auto industry.  Earlier in the afternoon, Business Insider forecast the rate for February would come in at 15.1 million, a substantial jump from January’s 14.1 million pace.”

And plugging an extra million into the equation means that unemployment should drop around 0.3% – to a rate of 8%.  We need to be talking 300,000+ jobs to get to that rate.

All kinds of caveats – no idea if the auto sales relationship holds up, lots of unemployed are on the sidelines, which means the unemployment rate may go up even with job gains as people re-enter the work force, etc.  But still promises to be a monster next Friday.  We’ll be covering it on twitter starting at 8:30am sharp.