Hello Chris:
I got click happily passionate with this thread and totally missed, until a second ago (your post on Bloomberg.)
OMG! Man oh man, that could be a thread/article/feature in and of itself.
Thank you, that was a nugget. Thank you for this report (May Employment not Believable), really, really superb.
SeanJ360: Thanks but I’ll defer/pass on those thanks towards Chris, I’m just the cut and paste dude who reads entirely too much since I don’t have a boob tube. Mike’s site is here
His new book Trend Following is super, he has a movie, you can find the trailer there as well. If I’m not mistaken I’ve been told there are some serious trend followers who trade more than I do on this site, you might want to email Cat and Dogs, I think that is who I was told in a post eons ago do this.
I don’t post much here, but I read all the daily posts and must say that this concrete evidence of censoring of our media is astounding.
The only thing I don’t really understand is that there is SO much incentive for the average joe who works at one of these major media outlets such as this to expose these cover-ups. I’m sure other papers and media outlets from around the world would pay that person gobs and gobs of money for the exclusive story during which these lies are exposed. I’m very surprised that this hasn’t happened already. Humans are humans, if someone was offered hundreds of millions of dollars and protection in exchange for evidence of this story, I’m sure there would be many takers.
October is always a safe bet for market meltdowns (I think what we have witnessed of late is little more than a market thaw but the ice jam is about to let go big time).
"Markets In Motion" by Ned Davis does a superb job of graphically illustrating market performance going back many decades. If you line up each year that a major market "crash" occurred the shape of the curves are nearly identical, and they almost always occurred in October. Very rarely has a crash occurred in a month other than October.
There are a few more dynamics other than earnings that drive the likelihood of October failures - actually earnings is historically a positive or neutral piece of news.
I think you have a lock on the pool if you take October. Barring completely unforseen events, I’ll be in puts sometime mid-September.
That’s exactly why you have to market neutral to be able to successfully trade the market. Trade what the market is doing, not what you want it to do. The last 6 months of the year could not only be historic, but also present rarely seen profitable trading opportunities - but only if one is market neutral.
I was wondering the same thing. I understand that the manipulation isn’t linear, but I’d like to see a year’s worth of unfuzzied numbers to see if they are actually changing the trend or if the real numbers would also look pretty bell-shaped. I know its the highest adjustment yet for May, but is it significantly higher enough to actually change the trend?
Shadowstats figures follow the govt-reported trend.09
Chris,
If you have a Bloomberg terminal you can see each version of the story. This happens all the time with economic data. If the market opens up, the first version of the story signals optimism and positive reaction to the data. If the market turns, the same story is revised with changes like you point out above. Today, we were up, then down, then up again…Thus the multiple changes in tone. I’m not saying this isn’t important, but CNBC and BBG do this every week.
Hello MentalMongrel:
There was a day, I think the 25th and 26th of May where stuff was leaking about this. If you watch this (gets interesting at the 2:36 minute point), until Mr. Fundamentals (who IMHO probably doesn’t knw much about them) cut the guy off.
But I agree with you, I have no idea why, other than maybe ignorance, late to wake up, still sleeping or just happy to have a job and knows Mr. Big pays his paycheck with advertising dollars.
Take care
PS IMHO it is going to get really apparant, really soon as they move to protect the USD. I don’t know CM’s view, I’m just a cut and paste guy, he is the thinker, but I think there is one thing [USD] standing between us and us being a bananna republic. I think they will move heaven and earth to hang on to that as long as possible.
As crazy as it sounds, I’m not so sure the BLS thinks they are dishonest. From Obama on down, they think they are creating reality. Their objective is to drive away the fears that they think are at the root of the downturn. It goes back to Roosevelt’s, "we have nothing to fear but fear itself."
I see a self-serving motive for that way of thinking: they have to create the impression that they have matters under control. As soon as the masses believe they have lost control, their power ceases.
In either case, we can be sure the lying will increase as the depression worsens.
Since all employers must pay SS, Medicare and Medicaid withholding tax for each employee, it should be pretty easy for the government to count the real number of employed persons. I know that would exclude self-employed, but so what? You could just call it the non-farm, non-self-employed labor statistics. The fact they don’t use something that is already at their fingertips would lead me to believe they always want to have a way to skew the numbers, and keep their methods from being transparent.
Would love to see a monthly chart plotting the difference between the BLS employment report and the ADP report, going back, say 15 years. That should tell us something.
The way I see it - if one disregards the birth/death adjustment figures - then employment loss was greater in April/May then what is was in December/January (the so-called bottom) - green shoots eh.
As you can see from the number of posts I’ve made, Chris’s fine work bringing this to light has touched a nerve with me, one that I am most passionate about.
I call it the Enronesque Nerve.
When I want to check the ‘split personality scale’ — markets and reality, or what Soros calls in some fancy word that just means the markets are always wrong, I go to my RSS iGoogle reader (of which I have share with a few here) and do a ctrl-f for a keyword. Today’s was job.
Last 6 months of this year could be truly historic...but not for reasons any of us will welcome. All these differentials are so large combined with trends...many of a exponential nature (i.e. our debt, etc) the changes could be remarkably rapid and severe...or of a non-linear nature as well.
If correct...are we ready mentally and emotionally beyond just the physically?
I agree with your take. I think this fall/winter is when things hit the fan hard. The confluence of events is just too much to ignore. Makes me want to buy some cheap farmland… hmm.
The author, Jeffrey Frankel, is a member of the Business Cycle Dating Comm of the Nat’l Bureau of Economic which has responsibility for "calling the trough". He, personally uses the rate of change of hours worked as his personal measure - his conclusion about the May report?
"…pursuing this logic leads to second thoughts about whether the most recent BLS announcement was really good news after all. The length of the average work week fell to its lowest since 1964! The graph below shows that not only did total hours worked decline in May, but the rate of decline (0.7%) was very much in line with the rate of contraction that workers have experienced since September. Hours worked suggests that the hope-inspiring May moderation in the job loss series may have been a monthly aberration. If firms were really gearing up to start hiring workers once again, why would they now be cutting back as strongly as ever on the hours that they ask their existing employees to work? My bottom line: the labor market does not quite yet suggest that the economy has hit bottom."
