There is one major problem, for the administration at least, when it comes to presenting labor data that is not "compiled" by the Bureau of beLabored Statistics and its Bank of Spain-endorsed Arima-X-13 [10]seasonal data fudging program: it reflects realty, not statistical or seasonal adjustments, and certainly can not be skewed this way or that depending on what best suits the incumbent presidential candidate two months ahead of the election. Which is why one won't read anywhere that one of the most reliable indicators when it comes to real time hiring data as reported by the actual job market and not by some conflicted, data challenged organization which on top of everything has data leak issues [11], namely Help Wanted ads just plunged by the most since the Lehman collapse.
Because while the ECB's disappointing announcement tomorrow will come and go, and the market may rise or fall, depending on how much accrued inflation and money printing is used by Draghi to push stocks higher, and sovereign bond yields of insovent countries lower, absent any of these monetary channels resulting in actual economic improvement (and as a reminder the central banking monetary transmissions pipelines have been clogged for a long, long time [12]courtesy of... central planning), all of it is for nothing.
And all of it may be indeed be for nothing if the reality presented by New Help Wanted ads plunging by a whopping 325,700, or the most since February 2009 in the past two months, is allowed by the BLS to penetrate the facade of made up NFP reporting.
From Credit Suisse:
[13]
This measure of labor demand suggests businesses have become a lot less willing to hire in the last two months. Jobless claims in recent months are not showing a deteriorating picture for the layoff side of payrolls, but help wanted online ads are showing weakness on the hiring side.
Biggest two-month drop since the recession three years ago. Help wanted online ads posted a second straight triple-digit decline in Aug after Jul’s big drop. Importantly, new ads accounted for the bulk of the weakness.
The two-month drop for headline help wanted online ads was -262.3K, while the two-month drop for new ads was -325.7K. Both were the worst two-month stretches since Feb 2009.
For the visual learners:
[14]
And confirming that the Help Wanted ads is not alone in predicting what in a non-banana kleptocracy otherwise be a wildly negative NFP print, here is the correlation between the Philly Fed index and the NFP change, courtesy of Newedge's Brad Wishak.
[15]
Of course, should the NFP indeed tumble by as much as it otherwise would if reality was even remotely reflected in official economic data, the stock market would likely open limit up as a negative NFP print would virtually assure that Bernanke would throw another $1 trillion or so of reshly printed Benjamins into the fire pit, because after all in the New Normal, what has failed 3 times will surely work on the 4th, 5th, or some other time.
h/t Pedro da Costa [16]