Last night when this author penned a piece predicting what would be a normalized estimation for the non-farm payrolls report, there was little indication of a massive deviation from the median 150,000 forecast by the financial press.
Silly blogger, Trix are for bureaucrats.
In true East German prediction before one of their “elections” when they reported economic data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided to pull out all the stops to indicate that the party comes first. The party being the government bureaucracy, of course.
The celebration was immediate as the data was reported with as this quick summary from Investing.com demonstrates:
As someone with a viewpoint through a historian’s eyes, I must admit these pages view everything from any source with great skepticism; after all America is now leading the world in speculative froth and fraud.
Thus when investigating what is going on under the hood of this report, the first thing that caught my eyes was this story from Marketwatch by Jeffrey Bartash:
Was there a September surprise in a shocking U.S. jobs report? Here’s a few clues.
The key excerpt is this one:
Before adjustments, the private sector shed 458,000 jobs in September. Government employment, on the other hand, jumped by an unadjusted 918,000.
This would be a massive increase in government hiring for a non-census year and during an alleged period of “peacetime” where no major war was underway.
What was even more astonishing was the audacity to revise the July and August data in the BLS report with an astonishing shift in defiance of their own annualized revisions which shocked everyone in August:
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised up by 55,000, from +89,000 to +144,000, and the change for August was revised up by 17,000, from +142,000 to +159,000.
With these revisions, employment in July and August combined is 72,000 higher than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal
factors.)
The emphasis added was from yours truly but highlights the audacious in your face that we the peon class had best accept as the gospel truth even though when one is in the real world there is no indication of mass hiring nor any measurable improvement in the survey or methodology used to create this report.
By using seasonal factors to “adjust” the numbers to a more desirable outcome, the headlines can be created and the media barking like the happy seals they are all singing the “party is great, the party is one” in unity.
But even Bloomberg didn’t buy this narrative:
Record Seasonal Adjustment Tones Down Blowout US Jobs Report
Excerpt:
Last month’s so-called seasonal factor, which is calculated by dividing the total seasonally adjusted payrolls count by the unadjusted figures, was the largest for any September in records back to 2002.
Oops.
This is why any statistical report from the government and in many cases private industry must be taken with an ocean load of salt. Be it a political or financial motivation, the idea to maintain a narrative for gain is obvious, especially this close to an election.
That is why I hesitate to provide any financial advice based on economic reports as the truth is one can not know if they provide any accurate information worthy of gambling one’s investing dollars on.
Everyone who has skin in the game should be equally as cautious before spending one dime in a market filled with charlatans and frauds that is endorsed by the very same people providing narratives instead of accurate statistical measures of the US economy.
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