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TrimTabs Continues Throwing Sand In The Eyes Of Fake Economic Data
Recently there has been a notable media campaign claiming released economic data is either wrong or outright manipulated. Not in China mind you, but here in the U.S. The latest to jump on the bandwagon for economic data correctness is TrimTabs, which released this zinger earlier:
TrimTabs Investment Research estimates that the U.S. economy lost 488,000 jobs in July, considerably more than the consensus estimate of a loss of 305,000 jobs. In addition, TrimTabs expects the Bureau of Labor Statistics to revise its job loss estimates sharply higher for the first half of 2009 based on the latest unemployment insurance survey results.
“While Wall Street is convinced the recession is over, the economy continues to shed jobs at an alarming rate,” said Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs.
TrimTabs’ employment estimates are based on analysis of daily income tax deposits to the U.S. Treasury from all salaried U.S. employees. Historically, TrimTabs’ employment estimates have been more accurate than those of the BLS.
At least someone is using actual data to derive non-propaganda conclusions. TrimTabs continues:
“The personal income report the Bureau of Economic Analysis released Tuesday contained huge downward revisions to wage and salary growth,” said Biderman. “Now that the BEA is using unemployment insurance reports from the first quarter to estimate current wage and salary growth, its data confirms what we have been reporting for months.”
The BEA’s estimates of wages and salary growth changed from year-over-year declines of 0.8% in April and 1.1% in May to year-over-year declines of 4.0% in April and 4.2% in May. Also, the BEA reported that wages and salaries dropped even more sharply in June, falling 4.7% year-over-year.
“Two months ago, we asked BEA economists how they reconciled the huge declines in real-time tax deposits with their report of a modest decline in wages and salaries,” said Biderman. “They could not answer our question. We know now that by ignoring real-time data, the BEA was providing an inaccurate view of the economy’s health.”
While Zero Hedge has been wondering vocally for months why there was never an 8-K released indicating that the second (through fifth)-lien lender formerly known as General Electric had acquired the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, it is about time that some other much more legitimate media outlets than Zero Intelligence started asking the same question.
h/t Lizzie
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More lost jobs than anticipated, downward revised numbers for the first half, why that's bullish, if it was actually that bad and we did this well, imagine how much better we are going to do when it actually gets less bad..Can some one say "??You do bull run run run, you do bull run run??"
CLICK THE ADS, SUPPORT THE SERVERS...
So, are those GS and JPM nos also on same lines??? :D
No, right next to this on the sidebar is:
08-05 10:54: Goldman Sachs (GS) forecasts US real GDP growth in 2H 09 to 3.0% vs. Prev. est. 1%
They said Real GDP, not fake GDP
Sounds like an oil pricing memo, adapted to this year's needs. This may be a positive confirmation of a major correction later this year.
Speaking of oil memo's ---Im sure this did not get out into the western pressed media ------I can taste that bonny light as we speak.
http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=149431
GS haven't got rid of all their longs yet and gone short enough, so they need more suckers
CLICK THE ADS, SUPPORT THE SERVERS...
It's amazing what frontrunning the markets can do to GDP. Who needs employees, we got robots.
Exactly who needs employees as employers go toast--
Weds 7/29 8:30 pm--Real UE stood at 18,944,657
Weds 8/5 1:30 pm-- Real UE stands at 19,000,322
avg loss at 409 per hr---136 hrs America lost 55,678 jobs and accelerating.
No jobs No mortgages
Weds 7/29 8:30 pm foreclosures stood at 1,299,814
Weds 8/5 1:30 pm foreclosures at 1,364,694
avg foreclosures in 136 hrs 64,880
Barter and Company will be be the next bubble.
Cash for clunkers accounts for 2.9% of it. ;-)
3% growth would get close to actually adding jobs to the economy.
The government follows a simple methodology and it is "Let's bury our heads in the sand". See ... simple.
Oh the market is going down so GS has to come out and ramp it back up again.
Yes, that was the time of the lowest print today.
They said 1060, not 1006 - silly rabbit, tricks are for bids.
Green shoots:
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=827960
The labor agreement will extend plant shutdowns next summer from two weeks to nine and during Thanksgiving week in 2010 at the Schenectady plant. It includes a cost-of-living wage increase freeze for the rest of the current contract, which expires in June 2011.
DePoalo has said his union has been talking with GE about bringing more work to Schenectady "for years." GE's requests were no surprise, he said.
DePoalo said the economy has been tough on local GE operations.
"The workload has been cut by 50 to 60 percent," he said. "It's actually horrific right now."
Individual tax receipts were down 21.8% for Jan-Jun compared to 2008. I don't see how the claimed unemployment figures could be accurate.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/104xx/doc10433/07-2009-MBR.pdf
Added: There are about 150 million workers in the US, so sacking 20% would be 30 million jobs lost. Even factoring in for shorter work weeks and such, you've got to believe the true unemployment rate is roughly double the claimed 9.5%
Sancho--thanks for the input, but you're doing some overestimation...check the lines describing the 2009 decline in treasury receipts:
"Withholding for income and payroll taxes was about
$13 billion (or 9 percent) less than that in June 2008. CBO
estimates that more than half of the decline in withholding
resulted from provisions in the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), notably the Making
Work Pay tax credit."
Good guess! http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data
Ralph Acampora sees Dow gaining 2,000 points from here - fears a melt-up -- he has emerged from retirement but has a pretty good track record
No offence...but you are out of your mind! Ralph "Make em Poorer" Acampora always chimes in at critical market inflection points. Mind his words ladies and gents for we have reached a short term top...fo shizzie.
oh I forgot to mention that Newsweek so bodly declared the "Recession is Over" on their recent cover. Yeah....I bought sum SDS calls today.
Still remember Ralph on CNBC in Jan-Fed 2000 saying that Nasdaq 6,0000 was his target for that year, but it wouldn't surprise him at all if it went through that.
Ralph was sooo wrong he had to do a Ron Insana for a while.
I just looked at his book on Amazon he was calling DOW "20,000" by 2011. Thank you internet for exposing these CNBC hacks for what they are!
I'd say Ralph doesn't have a clue what he's talking about!
none of this matters. it is old data. downward revisions mean future gains will be even more dramatic. BUY BUY BUY
(just scripting for cnbc a couple days ahead of time)
This Trim Tabs memo, coupled with the article in the FT about S&P's OWN report on Prime delinquencies March - June being up 13.8%, makes this all just... surreal.
Meanwhile the AIG Jan. 35 calls are up 127% as of right now.
no surprise here...the "jobless recovery"
"jobless" recovery?
typo: I'm sure you meant "job loss" recovery....
I thought inventories had been stuck about 1.4 x sales for ages...
First, I want to apologize to Zero Hedge for what I have done.
I went to Yahoo Finance to check some readings. I stopped; I do not know why, on the home page and scanned the news articles being listed at the moment. I hit on a post by Tech Ticker on the falling dollar. I believe it was written by Aaron Task in Investing about Mark Dow. In a nutshell, Mr. Dow set forth the notion that the dollar falling is a good thing. His position appeared to be that the devaluation of the dollar is not caused by the over-printing of dollars, but, it is caused by other countries having more faith in their own currency.
Again I am sorry. This is what I get for straying. I will pay the $ 100 fine at the end of the month.
Tech Ticker- I love the smell of dogshit in the morning.
whatever happened to the falling dollar makes
exports more competitive crap?
lol, what exports, every industry is now located in Bhutan or Nepal or Mexico or wherever ..
Blodget has a fine track record. I would definitely buy their recommendations. With leverage.
And I'm up over $30K today on AIG. I'm gonna hold my 3K shares till thursday (they're expected to post an actual profit, so-to-speak.) It's a really good feeling to know I'm making money on a scam that's being conducted by the establishment.
what would baghdad bob do?
excellent post - about time someone piped up and publicly called BLS data a farce!
You guys are bringing me down. Time to go over to CNBC and get my daily dose of Paxil Americana courtesy of Denny K. As the Macho Man used to say, oooh yaahh!!
What's the over-under on the BLS birth/death pad-justment for Friday? 200k?
Tyler, you just don't understand economics.
Because the numbers are so ridiculously bad, it means that they cannot get any worse. If they cannot get worse, it means things will get better.
Really bad news, is good news for the market.
Well what do Banana republics do that we have yet to do, work harder Obama, not smarter.
Hate to break it to you, TD...
GS has an investment in TTabs.
They also own 19.9% of Direct Edge.... but they have NEVER even smelled this crazy Flash thing.
This is soooo fucked up. They are going to lie and cheat their way for as long as they can. Then they will layer lies upong lies about the lies that they lied about and then they'l lie about that. And the worst part, fucking no one will ever be responsible. Must be the best fucking job in the world. you can outright fuck up a whole country or the world for that matter and not be held responsible and then when you quit you get guaranteed postition at GE or GS making megabucks and the govt pension that will never be altered. What a fucking gig that must be. Fucking bullshit. Fuck this shit I'm fucking pissed.
Stop whining. Seriously, you whine constantly. You're bright enough to understand. So deal with it, unless you're one of the new breed who doesn't think they have to. Either way, STFU.
Hmm... Another "100% ad hominem" basher. These fuckers are like mushrooms lately!
Same old, same old, GS lets the shorters short thinking the economy isn't doing well (cos it isn't) then wham, whack 'em on the head again and get them to push the market back up by triggering their stops.
This market is going to the moon, GS says so and anyone who thinks otherwise and sees fundamentals and reality is cannon fodder for them
Looks like a sandstorm coming:
Deutsche Bank (DBK GY) predicts 48% of US mortgages will be underwater by Q1 2011 vs. 26% Q1 2009 US MARKET COMMENTARYSays:
- Predicts 69% of subprime US mortgages will be underwater by Q1 2011 vs. 50% Q1 2009
I just took a deep breath and digested these numbers. WTF? And we're going to the moon?
ADP reports:
Note: the BLS reported a 415,000 decrease in nonfarm private employment in June (-467,000 total nonfarm), so once again ADP was only marginally useful in predicting the BLS number.
On the Challenger job-cut report from CNBC: Planned layoffs accelerated in July
Planned job cuts announced by U.S. employers totaled 97,373 last month, up 31 percent from June when it had hit a 15-month low, according to a report released on Wednesday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
July's announced job cuts brought the total so far this year to 994,048, 72 percent higher than the same span in 2008.
The BLS reports Friday, and the consensus is for about 300,000 in reported job losses for July.
Posted by CalculatedRisk on 8/05/2009 08:27:00 AM
I suspect most on the readers of Zero Hedge are traders or heavily involved in the markets on a daily basis. I make my living in a much less exciting procession – as CFO of a small importer of product for sale into the US retail chain.
I will tell you categorically that our business is terrible and has been terrible for the better part of 18 months. Retailers are simply not buying product (at least the products we sell) and we have been forced have cut about 65% of our workforce, both here and overseas. I will second Trim Tab conviction that jobs are still being lost at an “alarming rate” despite whatever is being reported in the MSM.
The environment is terrible for small businesses like ours and we see little in the way of change anytime in the future.
Last night I talked with 3 people who run their own businesses.
One was going to apply for the part-time position advertised at Farm&Fleet, one was only getting jobs when a forclosure flipper called and said he needed all the copper parts inside and outside replaced again, and the other was going to visit his mother and try to figure out how to ask for money to get by this month.
These guys were all living the high-life a couple of years ago.
I shut down my business last year and let 8 employees go. I saw the writing on the wall and I don't own any red ink so I closed it down. We're living on savings while I look for new ways to make money. It's a tough world but you have to keep your eyes open and make the painful decisions, most can't do it.
Good luck to you. Of those three I mentioned, 2 had employees in the past. One guy kept everyone on until the bitter end, and the other has slowly cut back until now it's just his secretary and one man in the field, besides himself. Unemployment here is about 20% now.
Might start to have a migration here up to Oshkosh (ala Oshkosh Trucking). After they scored that Army contract for new ATVs in Afghanistan, they had to switch from lean mode to mass hiring mode. The lines of applicants trying for a job was classic. And this is a small city.
http://www.fox11online.com/dpp/news/local_wluk_oshkosh_corp_job_fair_dra...
This has been known for a very very long time.
Government prepared economic statistics - FICTION
Corporate owned media economic statistics - FICTION
It has allways amazed me how the "release" of economic statistics by any government entity impacts markets.
We LIED YOU BUY/SELL Whatever??!!?
the main problem with the current unemployment statistic is that it doesn't take into account dis-employment. the dis-employed are workers who have been displaced out of the work force, who worked at one point and would like to work but no one will hire them and their unemployment benefits have run-out.
i truly think that the tax withholdings calculation that TrimTrabs is using is rather brilliant. it makes perfect sense as it factors in the displaced workers as well as all the people who commit suicide because they cannot find work. which actually is a problem.
any lost consumer, in any capacity, hurts the overall economy.
My wife & I have an arch biz, we had a good 10 yrs then it fell to ZERO from $100K/yr & she got breast cancer and our health insur was $20K in 2007, so I managed to go back to my nightcrew union Albertson's job after more than 20 yrs, just lucky I took care of myself, most people do NOT know Kaiser insur is $12K/yr for fam of 3 plus $8K in co-pays in a crisis.
TrimTabs blew it big time back in April of 2008. They declared the recession, which was not yet oficially acknowledged, was about to end by that time. Here:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/04/more-on-federal-withholding-taxes/
However, I do agree with their current view that the NFP number is likely to be worse than consensus come this Friday. I'm reaching that conclusion looking a Travisonno's data.
The team O is getting nervous the data massaging which they have learnt from Wall Street and then perfected copying the chinese, is finally showing signs of cracks of inconsistencies with real data (eg income tax and wages numbers). That is why tiny tim is proprosing extending unemployment insurance, so when the real unemployment situation eventually leaks out maybe 6 months from now, tiny tim pulls out a new rabbit from the hat to appease the masses. Good for those whose UI is expiring but what about those 3 or 4 million others whose UI expired long ago? The problem with extending UI is where do you stop? Indeed why not print money say a trillion and spread it to the masses now that we have entrenched deflation? We are slowly getting there (I mean Zimbawe). Be patient...
CNBC and Bloomberg headlines coming Friday:
"NFP unexpectedly deteriorates signalling end of recession as stock and bonds welcome end of recession with relief rallies"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrXhxmQJSS0
Everybody ! know is lay-off or worry about getting lay-off,ecept for the cops I drink with