The award goes to Bloomberg's Richard Breslow, author of "Trader's Notes" with the following pearl on China's weekend "data":
Chinese numbers came out; I was kind of amused that when they’re pretty much on expectations, nobody writes that the books are cooked and that you have to discount the exports, etc.; they came in right on expectations, and everyone high fives the science of economic forecasting. We’ve either got to seasonally adjust for book cooking or assume, like all numbers, they are an educated guess.
That about covers it, although considering the amount of book cookery going on in the US [5] and especially the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we wonder why nobody has yet said the exact same thing about pristine US "data"?
