Making Up Numbers

Eventually It Comes Out In the Wash

The unemployment numbers came out last week. They seemed kinda hot. Zero Hedge has a write-up here. We are in a technical recession based on how economists have viewed recessions over the past eons. Interestingly, prior to the jobs report, the spin from the left was all about jobs. Then, the jobs report comes out hotter than expected.

The Challenger Report offers a bit of a different story. It shows layoffs in July were down compared to the prior month, but up over the prior year. Job openings and hiring plans also fell precipitously. That could goose short-term employment numbers since it makes it look like the labor market is tighter than it really is since the supply of jobs went down due to the recession.

I will say this. I think you ought to toss out all economic numbers from 2020 and 2021. Ignore them. Go back to 2019. Covid and the government's response makes them silly to use when forecasting or trying to make sense of the economy. Sort of like using stock market numbers from 1930-1935 to extrapolate long-term return on equity. Hopefully, it’s a one-time event.

The tax receipt numbers on the abysmal bill that just passed the Senate are guaranteed to be wrong. Economic incentives will change, and the numbers will be far below the expected numbers. Joe Biden and the Democrats killed the bull market.

Lots of numbers are totally made up.

Virtually every Democrat has tweeted that “$35 is what we should pay for insulin” and no one has any data to back that number up. It’s just pulled out of thin air because it polls well. They forget that the highly regulated medical market for insulin causes the high price. There are only three manufacturers of insulin in the world. If you try to compete the FDA is there to make sure you aren’t in business very long. Additionally, the three big firms take their profits from insulin sales and plow them back into research into other drugs.

The health care system in America is highly demonized and politicized. But, there is no other place in the world where you’d want to be sick. Outcomes in America are by far the best in the world.

During the Obama Administration, people on the right side of the aisle confided in me they thought the numbers were being manipulated. America began to go tribal in 2000 after that contested election. Do you remember how the mainstream left-wing press always used the word “unexpectedly” when referring to the anemic Obama economic performance? I didn’t think they were manipulating numbers, and an academic I knew who follows it closely said they weren’t manipulated. The mainstream left-wing media was certainly manipulating expectations.

Why do I think the numbers might be manipulated now?

I wonder about the inflation numbers. I see reports from economists like Brian Wesbury who say the actual inflation numbers are far outpacing the published numbers from the government. He isn’t the only voice in the wilderness stating this.

By the way, meat and energy prices have come down from highs but it’s nothing that the Biden Administration did to cause it. Meat prices will continue to go down, but watch out once livestock farmers cull their herds. Also, watch out if the climate change people get total power. Bugs will be on the menu for American proletariats. They will turn up in school lunches first.

We have crossed over the horizon in America and it’s not the America we grew up with. The government has been weaponized against its citizens.

In an unrelated matter, Iowa Senator Charles Grassley uncovered a whistleblower at the FBI. The agency intentionally buried the Hunter Biden laptop stuff ahead of the election. The FBI still hasn’t bothered investigating it and if they did they are keeping it under wraps. The White House spinmeisters came out with a new character of Joe Biden, “Dark Brandon”. Then last night, two weeks after Dark Brandon emerged fully, the FBI raided the home of a potential political opponent of Joe Biden. It just happened to be former President Trump.

Suppose this story was of Trump raiding Biden’s home in 2018. Think there might be protests and cries of losing our country in the mainstream media? If they can do this to a former President, they can do it to anyone. In the recent bill that ran through the Senate, 87,000 new IRS agents will be coming for political opponents of the Deep State.

If you read one thing today, take some time to read this.

I lost a long-time relationship over Trump and Covid. I am still saddened by it. One of the reasons was Trump’s investigation into the Biden relationship with Ukraine when Biden was a potential political rival. Amazingly, we are sending billions of untracked dollars to Ukraine today to fight some war that isn’t strategically important to us. The Biden Family and its tentacles into Ukraine have never been investigated or at least made transparent to citizens. Makes you wonder what Ukraine has on the Bidens or at least wonder about the amount of crony capitalism that took and might be taking place. I’d like to know that before I sent tax dollars over there and certainly would want to know that before I put American lives in danger.

The data on Covid makes it abundantly clear that my opinion at the time was correct, and so far it looks like I was correct on the Biden Family. But, I will never hear from that person again.

When you look at the numbers on unemployment, they seem amiss.

The government isn’t always right. Economic numbers, even numbers that aren’t manipulated, get revised frequently. Back in the days when there were grain pits full of traders at the CBOT on LaSalle Street in Chicago, the pits relied on weather and crop data from the USDA. But, often, that data was wrong. It created an opportunity for Don Basse. He set up an operation that would go out and look at crops and replicate the USDA surveys. Basse’s company did it better than the USDA and traders would pay him thousands of dollars for the information. While the market followed the USDA the smart money took advantage and followed Basse.

Zero Hedge concludes,

So what's going on here? The simple answer: Fewer people working, but more people working more than one job, a rotation which picked up in earnest some time in March and which has only been captured by the Household survey.

And since the Establishment survey is far slower to pick up on the nuances in employment composition, while the Household Survey has gone nowhere since March, the BLS data engineers have been busy goalseeking the Establishment Survey (perhaps with the occasional nudge from the White House especially now that the economy is in a technical recession) to make it appear as if the economy is growing strongly, when in reality all they are doing is applying the same erroneous seasonal adjustment factor that gave such a wrong perspective of the labor market in the aftermath of the covid pandemic (until it was all adjusted away a year ago). In other words, while the labor market is already cracking, it will take the BLS several months of veering away from reality before the government bureaucrats accept and admit what is truly taking place.

We expect that "realization" to take place just after the midterms, because the last thing the Biden administration can afford is admit the labor market is crashing in addition to the continued surge in inflation.

The sum of all of these factors leads to a lack of confidence in the American people that the institutions they used to trust aren’t worthy of their trust anymore. Why should they support and fund them?

In accounting, you can carry errors on your books for some time. But, eventually, it all comes to light and out in the wash. My guess is you will see that in the jobs market come December and the Democrats will push for more spending because of it. Uniparty Republicans will go along with them.