Investing

[mtutiger]

6 minutes ago, Hongbit said:

They were touting 147,000 jobs gained in June.  Turned out it was only 14,000.  Actually,  it wasn’t even that since the numbers will get adjusted a final time when they get their annual adjustment for the end of the year.    The reality is that we lost jobs in June instead of gaining near 150k. 

Dow was up 344 points and Nasdaq 1% on the day the cooked numbers were announced.  

The Don apparently is taking over labor statistics now, so I'm sure the cooking will get worse.

[Tigerbomb13]

ONE BILLION JOBS CREATED IN AUGUST!!!

[Tiger337]

In my experience providing numbers to the government (not employment numbers), the numbers are not "made up" in the sense that they pull a number out of thin air.  They are cooked in that they'll change definitions and cutoff dates to their benefit, but they don't just make up a number.  When I was doing that kind of work, I covered myself by doing it the right way and also the way they asked and writing a brief report with both numbers in it.  

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, mtutiger said:

The Don apparently is taking over labor statistics now, so I'm sure the cooking will get worse.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-says-he-plans-to-fire-bls-chief-after-poor-u-s-jobs-report-7dce121b?mod=home_ln

[gehringer_2]

5 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-says-he-plans-to-fire-bls-chief-after-poor-u-s-jobs-report-7dce121b?mod=home_ln

I'd cut them a little slack - nobody counts all the people working one by one, it's all projected from survey data and Trump constantly roiling everything with the off agains/on again trade wars must throw all kinds of static at the survey models.

[Tiger337]

Just now, gehringer_2 said:

I'd cut them a little slack - nobody counts all the people working one by one, it's all projected from survey data and Trump constantly roiling everything with the off agains/on again trade wars must throw all kinds of static at the survey models.

Oh, I'm sure it's a joy working for BLS right now!

[mtutiger]

There's, very correctly, a ton of concern coming out of this about Trump cooking and / or juking the numbers to make things look good for his political concerns (I'll leave those for the other thread), but the reality is that businesses need reliable data in order to make decisions that are in their strategic/fiduciary best interests. 

Trump, by doing this, is basically undermining the basis of the data going forward. Just adds yet another level of uncertainty to an environment that he's already injected a bunch of uncertainty into. 

Edited 12 hours ago by mtutiger

[chasfh]

The whole idea is to destroy the credibility of the numbers—not just economic numbers but all the numbers the government has traditionally been responsible for—so that business will have to rely solely on the discretionary goodwill and largesse of the Trump government to succeed, instead of working as independent entities within a system as before. And they will have to pay the price of admission to obtain that goodwill and largesse, both in terms of money and willingness to comply.

[gehringer_2]

7 hours ago, Hongbit said:

They were touting 147,000 jobs gained in June.  Turned out it was only 14,000.  Actually,  it wasn’t even that since the numbers will get adjusted a final time when they get their annual adjustment for the end of the year.    The reality is that we lost jobs in June instead of gaining near 150k. 

Dow was up 344 points and Nasdaq 1% on the day the cooked numbers were announced.  

Of course the market doesn't really care about jobs - if anything they *like* seeing people get laid off if it increases corporate profits, so bad jobs numbers are necessarily going to pull down the market by themselves anyway. They don't even care if unemployment goes up as long as it's the poor getting laid off and so doesn't affect national purchasing power that much.