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Lies, Damn Lies, and The B(L)S Jobs Report
Wow. Just fucking wow. Even with stability in the Middle East
more fragile than an osteoporosis sufferer’s boney coccyx as Egyptian government
officials join in the protests against their own government (which is a bit
like Alan Greenspan protesting
against fiat currency or Camille Crimson protesting against
hummers) and Jordan
contemplates reforms to lessen the monarchy’s power (and newsflash King
Abdullah, you might want to do some reading on Czar Alexander II because once
you let Pandora out of the box, she’s not going back in, it’s called entropy
(though if it were Brooklyn
Decker‘s box that she were let out of, perhaps she would go back in)), with
the jobs report not just relatively awful by missing guesses by a fuckton, but
absolutely awful by showing fewer jobs are being created than in Whoopi
Goldberg‘s pants (and Money McBags is not entirely sure what that means),
and with propoganda being spread to impressionable of age females that a rise
in cancers are linked to oral sex, the market still went up.
Unfuckingbelievable. As the market seems to care about geopolitical
unrest, a national depression, and anything tangible about as much as Mark
Sanford cares about family values, all we can do is buy the fucking rip.
The big news was obviously the B(L)S
jobs report which headlines lauded as a fantastic report as the
unemployment rate dropped to 9.0% in a mathematical sleight of hand that would
make Fibbonaci proud and Bernie Madoff’s dick hard, the private sector added
50k jobs which would have been more if not for that frisky weather (and um, the
fucking depression), and the last two months of data were revised upwards by
20k each month (apparently the checks got lost in the mail).
So while analysts try to spin this number as positive (even though it was
more disappointing than the book Cooking
with Pooh is for coprophiliacs who order it sight unseen) as it was way
below their guesses of 145k and way fucking below the whisper number of 180k (and
as always, Money McBags only cares about whisper numbers if Kelly
Brook is doing the whispering and the number is 69), Money McBags will
break it down for you and show why it was so ugly that not even Bill Clinton
would sleep with it.
So below are Money McBags’ thoughts on the B(L)S employment situation
report and the Street’s reaction to it:
1. Using the weather as an excuse for the ginormous miss is just
fucking absurd. Honestly, the weather has now been blamed for everything
from lower retail sales (except retail sales were actually decent), to the
Protests in Egypt,
to the Fat
Boys breaking up. Analysts point out that a big reason for the miss
was that construction jobs were down 38k and transportation jobs were down 32k
and those two sectors are most levered to bad weather (construction is also
most levered to the glut of foreclosed homes available and the crash of home
prices, but that’s not important). That said even if we add back the 70k
jobs that were “weather related,” the jobs report number would still be 25k
below guesses. But that is not the most important point here.
The most important point is that these numbers are SEASONALLY FUCKING ADJUSTED
(bolding intentional, because, yes Money McBags is yelling) which means that
they should TAKE IN TO ACCOUNT THE WEATHER because, you know, THAT IS THE WHOLE
FUCKING POINT OF SEASONALLY ADJUSTING SOMETHING. Now look, Money McBags
is no Willard Scott (and not just because he doesn’t have a GMILF fetish), but as
far as he can tell, the weather this past January wasn’t any kind of anomaly
(like Carrot Top’s career), it was just kind of an average January, or at least
within one standard deviation of a normal January. So given that, the
seasonal adjustment should have seasonally adjusted for the fucking weather and
thus this huge miss shouldn’t have been caused by a little snow.
2. The economy didn’t really add 50k jobs, it only added 36k because
the government cut 14k jobs which is a trend that promises to get worse than
Rick Rolling or promise rings.
That said, there were 11k fewer temporary jobs which took away from the
numbers, so one could say 47k permanent net jobs were added to the
ponzeconomy™. Either way, you need to keep your eye on these government
numbers because they are only going to get worse (more importantly though, you
need to keep your eye on these
numbers).
3. The 9% unemployment rate is more misleading than Citigroup’s corporate
derivatives team and it only takes third grad math to figure it out.
Just think about it. All else being equal, if only 36k jobs were added
and ~150k people enter the workforce every month, right off the fucking bat we
have ~100k more unemployed people going in to the population, and using the
theory of something called Mathematics, that should cause the unemployment rate
to increase, not decrease. Of course the actual calculation has more
moving parts than a Rube
Goldberg machine or the Octomom’s vagina, so it’s not quite that clear cut
(though it should be), but the point is that just using the headline numbers
and saying unemployment dropped by .4% is intellectually bankrupt.
Here is a simpler, logical way to think about it. The unemployment
rate went from 9.4% to 9.0% with the addition of 36k jobs, so that would imply
that for every 9k jobs added, the rate goes down by .1%, holding everything
else equal (and Money McBags would like to hold these
equal). So, using basic math, for a 1% drop in the unemployment rate,
the ponzeconomy™ just needs to add 90k jobs and thus to get the rate down from
9%, to a cockposterous 0% full employment, never been reached before level, the
ponzeconomy™ just needs to add 810k jobs. Ok, sounds simple enough, but
here is the part where our minds get blown (and please let it be Alice
Eve doing the blowing, and it not be our minds), according to B(L)S’
report, there are 13.9MM unemployed people, so if 810k jobs get added (and thus
take unemployment to absolute zero, according to our calculations above), we’ll
still have 13.1MM people unemployed. That’s right, using the B(L)S’ math,
13.1MM unemployed people equals a 0% unemployment rate which only makes sense
in the land of Make Believe or Art Laffer’s head. Perhaps it’s a
derivative of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, we’ll call it the Hildasolis uncertainty principle
where the more you know the unemployment rate the less you know the number of
unemployed. So just step back from the numbers and think about this for
a second (and then step back from that and think about this for a few
hours).
Anyway, the real reason unemployment dropped by .4% was that more people
simply dropped the fuck out of the workforce and thus the labor force
participation fell from 64.3% to a record low 64.2%. If the labor force
participation rate had stayed at 64.3%, an extra ~300k people would have been
added back to the unemployed bucket and back in to the labor force, boosting
the 13.9k unemployed to ~14.2k and yielding an unemployment rate ~9.3%, which
is pretty much flat with last month’s number (though there is still some
fudging in there that would bring the rate higher, but whatever).
In all honesty, this remains the most brilliant government strategy since
giving Marilyn
Monroe a key to the back door. Last month Money McBags called it the
“Fuck off” strategy because simply telling the unemployed to fuck off, and thus
kicking them out of the labor force, is the quickest and easiest way to get the
unemployment rate down. Sure it doesn’t make the economy better, and sure
it is a bit heartless, but remember, the important thing isn’t the numbers, but
it is the perception of the numbers, and a 0% unemployment rate
would be perceived as something as awesome as Tolstoy’s War and Peace or
Malene
Espensen’s tits. So if you all elect Money McBags to office in the
next round of elections when he heads up the BOGUS
party, he promises you in his his first afternoon of work he will cut
unemployment to 0% with just the stroke of a few keys. Now that is some
fucking change we can believe in (and apparently another change we can believe
in is ending sentences with prepositions, as somewhere the great William Safire
rolls over in his grave).
4. Just some quick stats: 6.2MM of the 13.9MM unemployed (which
is 42%) are long-term unemployed, with the other 7.7MM being pre-long-term
unemployed. 2.8MM were considered marginally attached to the workforce
(up from 2.5MM) and they are as marginally attached to the work force as
Egyptians are marginaly attached to Mubarak or Taco
Bell is marginally attached to beef. Of those not counted in the
labor force, 1MM of them are “discouraged”, which means the other 1.8MM are
“fucking discouraged.”
5. The U6 unemployment rate was 16.1%, unless you want it seasonally
adjusted (and the seasons Money McBags likes in his adjustment are cayenne
pepper and stripper juice), then it was 17.3%. And since the U6 rate is a
better measure of all employment because it includes the discouraged, the
perplexed, and Mickey Rourke, and since it also negates the effect of the “fuck
off strategy,” it is more bizarre that we don’t refer to this when talking
about unemployment than it is that trying
to grow meat in a lab is so fucking hard (because really, if you want to
grow meat, just look at a picture of Sofia
Vergara).
6. Whatever this meinmyplace thing is, it is deliciously
awesome (though unclear why it takes so long to load). And yes, this
has nothing to do with the jobs report, but one can only look at made up
numbers for so long without a break.
7. The last 2 months were revised up by 40k lifting job creation in
November to 93k from 71k and in December to 121k from 103k, while dropping the
B(L)S’ credibility from none to Lindsay
Lohan. And this brings us to our most important point:
8. ALL OF THESE NUMBERS ARE FULL OF SHIT ANYWAY (even moreso than Manuel
Uribe‘s colonoscopy bag): The B(L)S manipulates the numbers more by
using seasonal adjustments, the fictitious Birth/Death goal seek model, benchmark
revisions, and telling numbers it won’t love them anymore if they don’t do
what it says. It is these benchmark revisions which shoot down any
credibility the No Labor Department might have had. For instance, the
2.3MM job losses from April 2009 to March 2010 were just revised up to
2.6MM. Come again? And if you are Jennifer
Metcalfe, then by all means, please come again. But seriously, how
the fuck can they change numbers from over a year ago? Shit, if tomorrow
the NFL awarded the Arizona Cardinals the 2009 Super Bowl or the AVN awarded Kelly
Madison 2010 MILF of the Year, don’t you think those fine organizations
would lose credibility (even if the lovely Ms. Madison deserved it)? So
why did Money McBags just waste all of his time analyzing this shit if it will
just be a different number next month, next year, shit even next fucking
decade?
Here is an example of how ridiculous these numbers are: The Birth/death model black
box model (and as always, the only model with a bigger black box is Nyomi
Banxxx) had all of its numbers from the past year changed in the benchmark
revisions. No really, the numbers which were completely made up anyway,
are now a different set of completely made up numbers so any analysis done with
them (and Money McBags always shows the preposterousness of them) was all for
fucking naught. Money McBags was so perplexed by these numbers having
changed and by the birth/death model number for January coming in at an
unheard of -339k (which is so far out of the norm that not it is not even
within a Kim
Kardashian fat tail of the mean), that he emailed some guy named Mish to
see if he had any fucking clue (and Mish
got all down and dirty with it so Money McBags wouldn’t have to, so enjoy,
and if you need something to wake up after reading that, enjoy
this). So the 36k jobs added include a non-seasonally adjusted 339k
somehow mashed in there. Sounds credible to Money McBags.
9. Ok, Money Mcbags has harped on the math plenty so far, but there is
one more thing he is having trouble understanding (other than people who watch
American Idol and how Minnie
Driver has a career), so bear with him. Last month, there were
14.485MM people unemployed, this month there were 13.9MM, for a difference of
585k. So if 36k got new jobs, and the labor force was reduced by 504k
(though the people not in the labor force only went up by 319k, so um, explain
that, oh right, the total population fell by 185k somehow, must have been a
breakout of that terrible “rounding error” disease), where did the other 45k to
230k people go?
| December Unemployed |
14,485 |
| Reduction in Labor Force | (504) |
| Jobs Added | (36) |
| ???? | (45) |
| January Unemployed | 13,900 |
Or
| December Unemployed |
14,485 |
| Increase in Not in Labor Force |
(319) |
| Jobs Added | (36) |
| ???? | (230) |
| January Unemployed | 13,900 |
Perhaps the unaccounted for are the new “Lost Generation.”
As usual, if you care about the made up numbers that are going to change
anyway, here are the details from Table B:
| January Change in Jobs |
|
| Government Jobs | |
| Govt Full Time | (14,000) |
| Total Govt | (14,000) |
| Permanent Private Sector Jobs | |
| Financial Servives | (10,000) |
| Other | 5,000 |
| Professional Services | 42,400 |
| Information | (1,000) |
| Transportation | (38,000) |
| Retail trade | 27,500 |
| Wholesale Trade | 9,200 |
| Education and Healthcare | 13,000 |
| Leisure and Hospitaility | (3,000) |
| Mining | 1,000 |
| Manufacturing | 49,000 |
| Construction | (32,000) |
| Plug | (1,700) |
| Total Permanent Private Sector |
61,400 |
| Temporary Private Sector Jobs | (11,400) |
| Total Permanent Jobs |
36,000 |
| Birth/Death Model Plug | An anomalous -339,000 |
| Actual Jobs |
Go Fuck Yourself |
So now that we have established that the jobs report was not just awful, but
manipulatedly gibberish and likely to be changed later anyway, you should all
write your news reporters/columnists/prevaricators when they hype up how great
the drop in the unemployment rate was. Shit, even Bloomberg
ate a dick on this one as they reported:
“The improvement underlying the drop in the unemployment rate is
in sync with reports that show the economy is gathering momentum, which in turn
would bolster job growth in coming months.”
Umm, Bloomberg, please read the above 2k words to see THAT THERE WAS NO
FUCKING IMPROVEMENT UNDERLYING ANY JOBS REPORT (except for 36k more jobs which
will do as much for fixing the economy as a kleenex will do for Barbra Streisand
when she sneezes).
Anyway, Money McBags will be back on the award winning When Genius Prevailed on Monday
with more market commentary, dick jokes, small cap analysis, and plenty of Marisa
Miller. And if you need your Money McBags fix during the day, he is
known to frequent the Twitter, the
Facebook, and the Rick’s Cabaret where he is not just
a shareholder (who happens to be up 13% in a month since buying back), but he’s
also a client.
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MM may be the Elmo of ZH- the simile dartboard is working (except for the Whoopie) thanks for a good chuckle when crying is apropriate. The weather created the most jobs in years- get yer shovel & get paid!
I guess the unemployed will be statidized to the dark corner like all good chemo patients on Obamacare. America is all about keeping eyes forward and deny the obvious pain.
Don't worry the 64% still working can cover Federal and State cash flow requirements.
just another report from MinPlen
DoublePlusGood
MM,
Thank you for the much-needed laughs. Your talent at creative writing outdoes even the most creative fudging of unemployment figures. Kudos!
Heh...I though Crimson was a sexy chick modeling jeeps. Not quite.
With all the illegals leaving and citizens renouncing, I'm surprised the decline in the workforce isn't larger.
Is a raincoat required to get to Crimson's site?
One of the finest rants ever to grace the cyberpages of ZeroHedge!
I salute you, mon ami!
My government doesn't lie to me!! :(
there is something FISHY about this post !
Well done, McBags! As Dear Old Dad Used to Say...figures lie and liars figure.
are you considered fully employed, if you are selling all your shit on ebay just to survive ?
nope, you are on Conveyor Belt No. U-6, trying to get it all sold before you fall off the far end. - Ned
since i only read zerohedge and max keiser, guess i never realized how utterly huge breasts have become lately. thank you MMbags for the reality of what all these beautiful woman are doing with themselves. did you know that 90% of females in Egypt have clit enhancement or mutilation? now that is a procedure, i decided, to use it.... before i lose it.
Snow weather does create jobs: machine operators were busy all day long to remove snow, utility workers, hospital, police, towing, insurance, roofing contractors, the list going on and on.
Great analysis. My favorite comment? "Hildasolis uncertainty principle where the more you know the unemployment rate the less you know the number of unemployed."
Another possible explanation: the black box calculation is done partly in base 2 (binary) cause they use a computer but other parts of the calculation are in base 10 (decimal) but someone forgot to convert the results?
Perhaps we could also invoke the possibility of "virtual employment" where an employed/unemployed virtual pair spontaneously "pops" out of the vacuum state that is the real economy (so no real job is required since there aren't any in the real economy!) But then the unemployed person disappears into the black hole/box event horizon (the BLS concept of leaving the employment universe) giving rise to a radiation stream of apparently real employed persons (normally, of course, the employed and unemployed virtual pair would annilihilate). Black hole, black box, vacuum economy. You get it. Its consistent with quantum field theory I think and makes more sense the the B(L)S statistics.
awesome, I'll take my news with incessant cussing and lurid metaphors any day. Now we just need a bikini girl delivering it while sitting in front of a map of america on fire. I'd watch that.
"So why did Money McBags just waste all of his time analyzing this shit if it will just be a different number next month, next year, shit even next fucking decade?"
Because it needed to be explained how if you torture the truth long enough it will admit to anything.
no, no, it was just waterboarding, and that ain't torture.
- Ned
San Francisco foreplay my bruda.
Apparently (to the left) if it's consensual it's not torture...wrap your head around that bad boy...ROTFLMAO!
No word yet on the deviance factor...I'm lettin em grind through the former first ;-)
Yes this race between core and real gdp is going to be exciting. If real gdp keeps plugging along unemployment will go down even if a lot of downsized people end up as ebay peddlers and self employed service providers. The telephone survey is likely to be the most accurate. The world has changed. And by the way i love to give the original source of the lies and damn lies quote his due. Mark Twain attributed it to benjamin disraeli, a keen wit sharpened by the vigorous and open debates of the british parliament.
Mc, +1, and well done
and they say the art of journalism is dead
If you look at the data year-on-year (Jan '10 - Jan '11), NSA, it is much simpler to read:
Population: +1.9m
Not in the Labor Force (NLF): +2.3m
Labor Force (LF): -.4m
Unemployed: -1.2m
Employed: +.8m
So, it's pretty obvious that ~ 400,000 unemployed individuals in 2010 got "fucking discouraged" and left the labor force. Consistent with the growth spurt in food commodities, agriculture employment was 6% up, so US still has chances to be a solid agrarian economy </sarcasm>
Great story ...was great to start Sunday morning reading such a fine article. Two words to live by in 2011: Food & Ammo
Our Brothers and Sisters over at Minitruth are doing a doubleplusgood job. Gotta give the Proles a daily dose of Hopium chased with some Victory Gin. I chat with them on occasion down at the Chestnut Tree Cafe. We often share a Victory Cig now and again. The furnaces in the basement are burning 24/7.
I also have authorization to inform you that our brothers over at Minifed will exceed performance quotas and the DJIA will meltup again this week. All hail INGSOC!
Oceania is such a great empire! I understand that Big Brother is gonna stand for re-election again...
I've noticed you have been hitting Sofia Vergara quite a bit lately. I am not complaining.
Great one!
More Taylor Raines
what's a vagina? does it hurt?
Most vagina's are out to scar your soul, and rearrange your furniture, but there are a few that make life worth living.
In my experience, that would depend on the vagina.
This thing of blaming everything bad on snow/rain/drought/tornadoes/lack of tornadoes reminds me of Soviet propaganda - when they had too little harvest it was either too little rain or too much. Anyway, thanks for a highly entertaining piece!
Once the 25th edition of Newspeak is released, you will understand how these things are possible. You think too much, and that is a crime, Brother.
Exactly
I'm not sure what it is exactly that I like about Money McBags' analyses, but I sure hope ZH keeps posting them.
Just check out:
http://whengeniusprevailed.com/
on a daily basis.
Now that was an inspired post. I do need to follow your links more often. Thank you sir.
It all works out using hedonic numerology -- check your calculator for this mode, I believe there's also an Excel macro. Hedonic numerology provides means to solve expressions like one is the loneliest number and perform functional analysis as in the sixty-nine sexual convolution function (♀*♂)(t) = joy.
Or just paint it a different color and voila!...added value at the same or lower price so inflation certainly must be contained.
Sheer economic marketing brilliance...oxymoronic you say?...pish posh, why just look at our labor stats here...more out of work must mean lower unemployment rates...why?...because we said so...LOL.
LOL +100
Why doesnt the BLS just report 500K job growth every month? Really straight up lie. Oh, but then they would need only one employee (the one to take Bernanke's call on what he decides to report). But they need to keep their department of thousands of employees busy and the result is they probably actually believe their bull shit.
Epic, I mean EPIC analysis!
On spot-AS USUAL, thanks Mc.................
Thats nothing, ABC news last week announced chocolate production was up, swear to dog...
the lysdexic, agnostic, insomniac who stayed awake all night wondering if there is a dog ;-) - Ned
Never, ever, feed chocolate to a dog, even if production is up:-) -Hulk
MoneyMcBags; You the McMan!
MoneyMcBags is the next Jon Stewart with a Charlie Sheen gene. Ergo, he will be 10x funnier than John Stewart (especially after hiring John's writers away).
Love it! Better than the Sunday paper. Thanks MM.