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Unadjusted January Retail Sales Post Biggest Sequential Plunge In History
The topic of BLS propaganda seasonal adjustments has been discussed extensively here especially in light of January's NFP beat. We'll leave it at that. However, we were rather surprised to note that the Census Bureau may have also ramped up its seasonal adjustment "fudge factoring" because when looking at the January headline retail sales data, which naturally was a smoothly continuous line on a Seasonally Adjusted basis, rising from $399.9 billion in December to $401.4 billion in January, something rather odd happened in the Unadjusted data set: the plunge from $459.8 billion in December to $361.4 billion in January, or -$98.5 billion in one month, was the biggest one month drop in retail sales in history. Now we won't say much on this topic, suffice to say that it would be far more useful if the BLS and Census Bureaus were to open up their models and explain in nuanced detail just what "old normal" adjustments they still incorporate into data sets. Because as many have already noted, seasonal adjustments used for data from 1980 to 2008 when "up" was the only allowed direction for everything, are completely irrelevant and misleading in the New Deleveraging Normal. Which reminds us: Zero Hedge will offer $10,000 to the first BLS employee to share with us the full and complete excel model set, including assumptions, data tables, and comprehensive output parameters that the agency uses to go from input A to output X. We hope that by spending that money we will finally do society a service and open up to everyone just how it is that the BLS adjusts its Non-Farm Payrolls data.
As for Unadjusted retail sales, here they are:
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I'll reserve my judgement until the TV tells me how I feel about this.
I love the smell of fake numbers in the morning!
I told you! Central banks are colluding with primary dealers to tighten credit and put the squeeze on retail stocks! When is the SEC going to put a stop to this manipulative tightening!? Central banks need to loosen monetary policy in line with poor consumer spending figures, and retail banks need to provide easy credit to boost aggregate demand.
you're the best troll ever...
...except all the other ones.
OK -- Here you go:
=[type in number from AgitProp office]No no. Here is the true excel model set:
Sales =[Whatever the squid and banksters say it is]
You say that like "squid and banksters" are (i) different from one another, and (ii) not the "AgitProp office." I beg to differ on both accounts!
I assume Census uses X-12-ARIMA for their seasonal adjustment on this release like they do for their other releases, which basically means they put all the data in a giant sausage maker and some smooth-lined goop is supposed to come out the other side. If you're morbidly curious you can look through the documentation and even download and install Win-X12 and mess with it to see what you can come up with, but it's not a particularly enjoyable experience from what I remember the last time I tried it.
Let's see: An all-season record negative raw number becomes a small positive after "seasonal adjustment". Translation: We lose $100 on every sale, but we make it up on volume.
Well, at least it does shed some light on the adjustments they use to get the implausible unemployment numbers!
Fine Art, Bitchez!
all that matters now is whether the Fed is going to buy the stock market. No clue how much more in profits can be wrung from this...the whole thing goes over the falls when iShit becomes passe
Remember this is the modern GIGO. Garbage in, Gospel Out.
"Zero Hedge will offer $10,000 to the first BLS employee to share with us the full and complete excel model set..."
I expect a return on this modest investment -- I would observe, however, that the source being a government clodpate, would have turned for much less.
Is there a troll of the year award? In the context of a trading site, MDB is simply the best.
I would nominate Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart as a pretty good paper troll. He was expecting phenominal retail sales. Hopium is a wonderful thing.
Joe Wiesenthal is a cancer to the internet. That man should be banned from publishing anything economic related.
hard to beat "robotrader" though...
Naw, you're not a troll if you truly believe what you say.
MDB doesn't really believe the stuff he says... I've seen a few cracks in his facade based on word choice, sentence structure, continuity, etc. Robo on the otherhand is a true whack-job!
And we used to get trolls like Johnny Bravo & Master Bates who would at least stick around and argue their troll droppings.
Most trolls these days are dump and run.
MDB is the best deadpan delivery I've seen with the written word - pure comic genius.
I love you.
MDB, that was funny!
8
Or we could declare financial and moral bankruptcy; start over by working for a living.
In other news:
MDB...I love the smell of your scarcasm in the morning.
Well the radio was really giddy about it. As they were about some new poll that Santorum was ahead. That led the newscast.
Funny though, they made it seem that there were only 3 candidates left on the GOP side.
Must have been an accident.
pods
Huh. I thought they were all just Obama in whiteface.
Are you sure Obama isn't just a more well spoken Dubya in blackface?
sure says "ummmmmm" a lot for being well spoken...
Particularly when the telepromter isn't around to tell him what to say.
Santorum lead the newscast? Ahead of Whitney? Who botched that one? :D
Prolly a Christian station
Same here-over and over on the radio how "retail sales are up",recovery in progress.
The gov has to hope the majority stay dumb enough to buy into it......
'Buying into it' has a sticking point when they cant afford to buy into enough food to have dinner.
The TRUTH no longer matters, just the narrative.
Isn't Obamunism WUNNERFUL?
It's all about the delegates and he-who-shall-not-be-named actually has the most. Popular vote is meaningless.
That's pretty funny though that "Frothy" Rick Santorum who couldn't get re-elected to his Senate seat and got tossed out on his ass by his constituents now thinks he is somehow electable on a national scale.
I could tell it was a commercial for him. Thought it was an ad for GM.
You almost cannot even listen to the headlines anymore.
LOL...thats even if they report this:
Oh yeah, I foresee a real BIG round of hiring this summer.
In a sense, the corporations are in a bind here. They have to hire debtors because the banks that lend THEM money, and the governments that give THEM tax breaks, are pressuring them to reciprocate whatever profts they do earn, back into the communities in the form of jobs nad investment.
The growth we have, isn't healthy growth. It's just more McStuff being shuffled from port to port, store to store. My friend and I on Sunday night, as we walked from a pub in Cambridge, were ASTONISHED to see the sale signs at the shops. "40% off, 50% off, 75% off!" There is always Janurary sales in the retail sector....but NOTHING like this.
The MAIN problem the BLS doesn't foucs on is, these new jobs do not come close to the wages that keep up with the money supply (which will most likely expand again after more Eurozone shenanegians). The lack of benefits leads to lack of security; which in turn, leads to public panic. And when young people are not employed, as we see in Greece, act a fool.
In the end, this all means more money for the banks (as consumers get serious about a)getting more debt to keep their McLife afloat or B) paying down debt=bad for economy) and landlords (as renting goes up for those under 35...again, more money for banks), and less for the retail shops (who will probably end up consolidating, which is NOT good for the free market).
As Stephanie Kelton said on Twitter, "Workers are getting hammered". And she isn't just talking about the dude bros hitting up $1 draft night at the local pub on a Friday night.
Nevermind that all of these "cooked" BLS U3 numbers WILL have a market correction at some point after the election. They always do, no matter what sides wins.
2013 might be the Year of the Great Layoff.
Government data is totally useless at this point.
we'll see how people spend their money when gasoline gets to $4/gal soon...
And so this is what the masses and young fund managers get with their morning coffee and croissants...
"The figures follow a report earlier this month that showed improvement in the labor market may help sustain spending. Employers added 243,000 jobs in January, the most since April, and the unemployment rate dropped to a three-year low of 8.3 percent, according to the Labor Department."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-14/retail-sales-in-u-s-rose-in-january-as-shoppers-sought-post-holiday-sales.html
Which explains Tyler's offer of $10,000 to lift the BLS veil.
"Zero Hedge will offer $10,000 to the first BLS employee to share with us the full and complete excel model set, including assumptions, data tables, and comprehensive output parameters that the agency uses to go from input A to output X."
US Census data is the best data on the planet. Interestingly...only the Chinese have a history of "counting their people" the way the US has done since its inception. Moreover with the information age the need for really doing this anymore has pretty much been obviated. As data collection services explode throughout the planet "those who put the data to effective use first" win. That would be Time Warner, Bloomberg News, News Corp, Al Jazeera etc. "And there's your vast right wing conspriracy" as they say cuz everyone of these entities is run by "the utmost of so called conservatives." Don't worry tho...they won't be voting for Rick Santorum. (not that they're concerned about a President Santorum of course. They'd love that!) Insofar as labor numbers go--they'll take you bet i imagine...then reclassify the bulk of the American people as farmers! (and if you think that's funny...believe it or not that's EXACTLY how it was done for almost 300 years in the USA. It wasn't until World War II that reliable data for economic statistical purposes was created. Combined with a company called IBM and suddenly--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQRIOKvR2WM&feature=player_detailpage
Business is not booming.
I disagree. A kid in our neighborhood could not find a job, so he started a repo business with his uncle. Damn kid made more last month than I did right out of of school with an engineering degree.
"repo-ing" is going to be big pretty soon. 'course it be the "looting" version, but that's just semantics.
"It's a golden age for the repo men, one that will never end."
On a personal level, that is the key. It is an aspect of the Dao, balance. As the corporations eat everything and exploit everyone, one by one individuals find their niche and succeed.
Did you hear that Whitney Houston died?
Better than expected.
Yes - and let's talk about it because that will make us feel a little better in the face of this devastating loss.
Should give a boost to the music companies with the upcoming tribute albums(can you call them that any longer ?). That's good for retail sales. No?
The fark headline was hilarious, "Whitney beats Bobby Brown to death."
Between that and the "birth control" debate one has decided that Seinfeld reruns really are the only thing worth watching on TV.
sarcasm, in it's finest hour...
Ah, but with Netflix, I can watch reruns of The Rat Patrol whenever I want.
They got "Daktari" on there?
No :( but they do have Flipper.
+1 I fired up rat patrol again just this past week. I had forgotten the squealing tire sounds on the sand, hell, they beat the Dukes of Hazard by a good decade :0
Don't know if you've seen it, but you might enjoy "Play Dirty" with Michael Caine, avail on Netflix instant, too.
Excellent - thanks!
Everyone loves... the king of the sea....
"Voyage to the bottom of the Sea" on HULU. Same place the US dollar is going...
coming from your avatar, that "DAKTARI" reference was hilarious! +1
<bow>
I actually have Rat Patrol on my netflix instant list- reminds me of a simpler time...
haven't gotten lucky lately i see. try "stickin' it in the street"....
Wait, when was Seinfeld ever not the only thing worth watching on TV? Well, I guess you gotta count Ice Road Truckers, too.
Newman!
No I think it was Britney who died in that tragic hotel bathtub accident.
Please verify that it was Britney and not Whitney...Americans await with bated breath which "Celebrity" has died.
britney's tragic accident will be along a few months after she marries her joo manager.
It was already priced in...
Gold sporting a little wood though.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain; I am the Great and Powerful Oz!
"Zero Hedge will offer $10,000 to the first BLS employee to share with us the full and complete excel model set, including assumptions, data tables, and comprehensive output parameters that the agency uses to go from input A to output X."
Heh!
Which leads me to suspect he'd really pay $25k.
The offer is not subject to seasonal QE adjustments.
So much for government transparency and FOI.
Here is the computational formula...
http://cdn2.holytaco.com/wp-content/uploads/images/2009/12/expand.jpg
I'll take that $10,000 in gold please...
WTF, we now have to coerce government employees to prove that the statistical manupulations of data is just that. There is only one reason to manipulate anything, and that is to bend the truth.
I am so tired of this bullshit it makes me want to scream. The lies and truth bludgeoning are so fucking blatently obvious, yet we tra-la-la through the day watch The View and other such TV blatherings.
How could it be that consumers aren't spending?
They got all those new jobs, which barely let them afford food and shelter. Very odd.
Fimb da Jobs
Are you using these charts to terrorize Merican workers and trusted government servants?
Christmas 2011...
- Everyone go to the store, & buy presents
- Exchange them
- January, take them back and redeem your initial cash...
(oh... & happy Valentine's Day here's your chocolates... please don't eat them, I'm going to need those back)
You may have them back when I've finished them...
"Gee honey why are you so down?" "It's the job, it isn't easy thinking up new lies everyday. When I was younger I could do good ones off the top of my head. Now it gets harder and harder to do original ones."
Well, if this is where we are going to have to get the truth on all these BS numbers I guess it is time for me to make another donation to Zero Hedge.
It is the very least I can do to keep the truth flowing. I bet there are more than one or two at the BLS salivating about now.
Watch out for that first step. It's a doozy.
Ha, check the Drudge headline. $5 gas coming to a station near you real soon. The implosion that is coming will be like nothing the world has ever seen.
Damn straight. I dont really know the exact reason the Ponzi was pumped to such levels, it doesnt really make any sense other than just denial on their part. But soon as gas starts going back up (.30 cents here overnite) its going to be a world of hurt.
It is the slowest motion trainwreck ever.
Remember 08?
Oh everything is fine.....everything is fine..... OH WHAT $4++ GAS. Derail.
AIG needs 40B overnight what? Lehman who? Fannie and Freddie say again?
BOOM!
Get ready that is all.
To hold on to power long enough to get their plans for us in place. They are planning and we are watching dancing with the stars. And by we I mean you :>
We are so fucked.
Correction: Those who have not prepared well are fucked. Gas prices? I'll walk to work. Food price inflation? I have that covered too.
Apparently, we have someone on here who down votes posts simply for cursing within them. Sweet, that first down vote showed up at the same time as mine, and I up voted yours of course.
You guys notice the little pop in real currency just now?
real money as opposed to real 'currency'.
just a quibble.
Make it rain Benjamins bitchez
Unadjusted, it's still 20bn bigger cake than in Jan 2011. As was the unadjusted employment about 2m bigger than in Jan 2011. Still seems resonably normal to me....
Still seems resonably normal to me.... he bleated. And then, in a moment of revelation, he...(to be continued)
If you look at the numbers, they are ok, but if you look at what you would like to see, they are not, right? Unfortunately, financial markets don't behave like that. I think it's better to be a pragmatic than a fundamentalist - look, I got a few "dislikes" right away even though nobody denied the message with any new info.
ZH produces excellent non-MSM commentary but sometimes you just need to do your own DD. For instance last night the news in ZH about Finnish collateral deal "derailing" Greek bail-out. No, it had been agreed in EU level months ago, it was no news. It was a juicy headline only in ZH.
I'd rather be a pragmatic.
Problem is, its a shit cake. Bigger is not better.
As Banksters become more unlawful
And Congress resembles a brothel
This sytem is fit
For serving up shit
A Kleptocrat "terrible awful"!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0MuzlwbVos
You really need to make a book of your Limericks. I believe they will be very informative and
valuable reading ATC..
As always...thanks for your kind words Hulk!
Turns out that their model has recently ... since the election of 2008 ... had error terms with autocorrelations that are now significantly different from 0, which suggests serial correlation that needs to be compensated for. The new model includes a new term to account for the Obama-Rah-Rah effect.
My Meucci cue purchase last month didnt put retail sales over the top? I was sure it would have. Oh well, I figured times are coming where youll have to make a living hustling pool, so I got that covered anyway.
Ah, Meucci cues. Brings back fond memories of cutting class in college to shoot pool. One of the reasons I changed from engineering to English half way through.
I always preferred McDermott...
Yea but I only had $500 to spend, not $1,500...besides I have 2 McDermott shafts.
I got your McDermott shaft right here. Wait, what are we talking about?
You have Jim McDermott's shaft?
I'm only wondering how this little bit of truthiness slipped thru the number changer overlords?
Maybe its a first sign of 'reverse direction' time?
Well, we see the problem here clearly....this is 'unadjusted' data, just wait till they adjust it proper in a few minutes.
I cant wait for the tax income numbers to come in.
"But we have all these jobs......where the tax revenue? Oh wait, what do you mean that 25% of 26K (the median salary) aint shit?"
Its the old seasonal adjustment again. Raw sales are TERRIBLE, but the SA numbers look OK.
http://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/retail-sales-up-in-jan-sa-but-sales-plunge-in-the-raw-data/
Watch economists trumpet SA numbers until NSA is better than SA, then they quote NSA. Bob Shiller from Yale is notorious for this.
Same trick with YoY and sequential numbers. 1st and 2nd derivatives are also a favorite. With the GDP number they sometimes multiply the latest sequntial number by 4 to get an annual estimate. When it suits them.
Plunge in January '12 retail? Snowblower and ice salt sales way down
Usually they blame bad sales on bad weather.
where is the genius Slaughtere...thought we were gonna have a short squeeze of epic proportions in eurusd...dumb ass just like robo
It's still up 5% from a year ago... which is still incredible when real incomes were only up 1.3% .. average new jobs created paying 40% less than the jobs that were lost in the recession.. in NY at least.
DOW -30? OMFG this really must be serious!
The farm animals are getting restless. It's time to increase their dose of fear.
apparently the economic data doesnt mean anything anymore....spus only down 2 with this data ALGOS rule the world
I would donate 1K to that cause, we need a BLS whistleblower to blow this bitch up.
I'm in for 100 fiat clownbucks to the BLS whistleblower fund, so we can find out the model is calling external network macro getBlankfeinNumber()
If we all put $1k in we could prolly buy the whole department. How fun would that be!
Hardly scientific but you can almost feel there is something wrong...my morning commute on the MassPike is wide open these days...completely inconsistent with even 2009 and MA is supposed to be one of the better off states...just came back from Miami and there is a fair amount of building and renovation going on but not that many people except from overseas...
Prolly a lot of 50 year old Noreasters in So.Fl. for a cheap condo a low utility bill and a view of the pool so they can pack it in and coast the rest of the way home and let someone else cover all the taxes that woulda otherwise been headed down their throats the next 15/20 years
Well, I am 42 Yes We Can but I fit your description to do just that at the end of this year. The biggest real problem in the U.S. is demographics combined with Fascism, restriction of competition in Healthcare.
The new way to tax is call someone mentally ill, cops come and next thing is $20k hospital bill. A very new form of mugging. All those retired folks with something left in their estates will have nothing left and that is when things will really change. If and when that happens to you, tell the cops you just got a pyschiatrist, rush out and get one for $400-$500 cash and go on Xanax or other chill pill of choice. This beats a $20k bill.
While I sat at What-a-Burger yesterday (eating my healthy snack!...fries, etc.) I saw 6 people come in and fill out job applications...5 middle age and one who looked like my Grampa.
Is this the job creation? The GDP growth they are talking about?
I asked the owner how many he hires a month and he said less then one since the ones he has hold onto their jobs like a life raft.
Ssssshhhhhh. We talk about "jobs". Talking about "money" is communist.
Yes, they would hold on for dear life, those "manufacturing" jobs are not easy to get. Here is another barometer of hard times, ZLB Plasma, where people go to sell their blood/plasma for a few extra bucks (about $40 and I know people that sell twice per week) now has a line 24 hours per day even though they close at 7 p.m. and 5 on weekends. They were not even open Sundays till recently.
QE 3 quickly coming into focus on the horizon. Great Depression student Bernanke will not go down with the printers idle.
I read an article today where GE is going to hire 5000 veterans over the next few years. It made me feel all warm inside and I almost for got about the hundreds of thousands they are shipping overseas.......almost
Advice to BLS staffers: take the $10,000. Goldman is laying off nowadays, so things might not work out the way you'd hoped.
This headline isn't misleading is it?? From Yahoo finance,,this shit is is enough to drive you normal..
Retail Sales Rise Modestly, but Recovery Advances
Anyone who piled into Coach at $10 in 2009 scored a 7-bagger.
Now at $75, new record highs.
A $50,000 IRA account turned into $375,000 in 3 years.
The U.S. Consumer is unstoppable.
You do realize of course that courtesy of the foreclosure settlement Americans will once again, after 2 years, finally have to either pay a mortgage or rent, as banks will now have full right to evict squatters?
Not a chance... the settlement has not a thing to do with the standing (or lack there of) of a plaintiff to evict a deadbeat... it also has nothing to do with any individual, civil claims to overturn prior foreclosures based on void judgments, e.g. fraud upon the court (swearing to the authenticity of robosigned documents) or failure of service.
It certainly helped the banks from fighting on both the western and eastern fronts... but by no means does everyone have to start ponying up anything. Instead, I think they would only have to pay something if they are so stupid as to agree to the pittance offered for their troubles and/or jump at a free refi, etc. Until that day, the deadbeats get to stay put, rent free... and the clouded titles of tens of millions of properties still remain.
[presuming of course that deadbeats want to exercise their rights in court].
Not a chance Tyler. I have two neighbors who live down on the golf course who have not paid the mortgage on the $1 million homes for over two years and they firmly refuse to pay a dime in the future.
They say if Wall Street can bonus themselves Billions, they can "bonus" themselves a little too.
Their plan?
To move out in the middle of the night when they need to and "just walk away."
Rule of Thumb for them:
"Follow the Leader"
Sad stuff.....
Ahh, Tyler... You're forgetting mark-to-myth! If they evict, then they will still receive no payment, until someone buys. But nobody will buy the house at the mark-to-myth price, so in order to sell the place and resume receiving mortgage payments, they'll have to mark to market, which will decrease their "assets" by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per property. Since they are leveraged to the hilt, this can't happen. 100,000 houses x $100,000 = ten billion dollars. $10b assets held as a 5% fractional reserve is $200 billion dollars. And as all good ZH readers know, there are a whole hell of a lot more than a hundred thousand people living rent free in their underwater mortgage.
A million forclosures = a trillion dollars of fiat, vaporized!
Boom, it is worse than you think because when a bank books a mortgage they book the entire 360 monthly payments they expect to get as an asset, in my case I borrowed 130,000 and the total of the 360 payments was over $360,000. That will appear as a declining asset month by month till the loan is paid off. Some people think the loss to the bank is the amount of the principal balance less what they can get by selling the REO on the open market, untrue, the loss they have to book is the total of all 360 payments when they move that from the asset column to the loss column, because that is what they booked as an asset that is what they book as a loss when the mortgage fails.
And it is actually worse than that because in most cases the mortgages were sliced and diced and sold and resold with quite a lot of leverage, that $360,000 asset was then carved up and sold for several times that to "investors."
At the median house value in the peak of the market when millions of homes sold per year the underwriting was in the trillions each year, but the assets booked were more than triple that. It is also why the bailouts where so much larger than people would have thought, because we were bailing out assets that were expected over 30 years compound interest not simply the cash losses of principal balance less real market value.
The taxpayers have been screwed so many ways from Sunday it is practically impossible to count them all. In the end it would have been far easier and cheaper to simply void all US mortgage debts even though those with equity would have started a revolution because it would not be "fair" to them.
@Robo
What's more likely is that if a block trade on Coach, from an individuals IRA account, to the tune of $50,000, came across the wires or dark pools at that time... Some whale who is getting FREE MONEY & can front run anything, would have naked shorted the shit out of it until the IRA account holder panicked, saw most of their savings wiped out, cashed out, and gone home with their tail between their legs & is now living in their mom's basement like you...
$10,000?
We hope that by spending that money we will finally do society a service and open up to everyone just how it is that the BLS adjusts its Non-Farm Payrolls data.
since it's valentimes day i will give you a little present, tyler, and tell you that they do it by playing bingo! in the lunchroom the day before
it is very subtle, and the players are not in on it
they just play their card and see who wins the free dessert
but the head dude/ette takes the winning card and apllies what can only be called "theColonel'sSecretRecipe" to it, starting w. the 4 corners and working inward toward "free" in a step-array series which, as you can imagine, would be quite lo-variance
from this, they get a "coefficient of adjustment" which is applied to the raw data
you can keep the tenLg for the site b/c slewie hearts zH, and you're kinda cute, too, tyler!
"the plunge from $459.8 billion in December to $361.4 billion in January, or -$98.5 billion in one month,was the biggest one month drop in retail sales in history"
All those credit card invoices from Holiday shopping have arrived. The "middle class" just realized they do not have enough money to do any more shopping until June.
http://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/download/text/adv44x72.txt
Does this get me $10K
Apple I-phone taking a bite out of wireless company profits!
Report says AT&T, Verizon and Sprint is subsidizing Apples profits!
http://www.mcall.com/business/la-fi-iphone-blues-20120211,0,1161210.story
Um... I'm not entirely familiar with US law (what there is of it these days) but did Tyler just offer to bribe a govenment employee for access to confidential information?
My motivation for asking is purely selfish of course... I'd hate to see you guys dragged off to some Gitmo or Diego Garcia gulag. Where would I get my financial news then?
Its not bribery when the information is supposed to be public in the first place.
Life's a beach on Diego Garcia.