Near record unemployment rate at 3.7%
Inflation close to or within target range
Great GDP 3%+
Interest rates trend downward
Consumer sentiment significantly increased
...
...
...
...
...
....

rfenst wrote:

Near record unemployment rate at 3.7%
Inflation close to or within target range
Great GDP 3%+
Interest rates trend upward
Consumer sentiment significantly increased
...
...
...
...
...
....

rfenst wrote:

You prolly didn’t see the Fed statement today that blew up the stock market.

HockeyDad wrote:

After spending months trying to sell his economic agenda under the banner of “Bidenomics,” the president’s team is frustrated. Voters aren’t believing them when they say that the economy is doing excellent and that Joe Biden deserves the credit.

Rather than make a meaningful attempt to understand the American people’s economic pain and recognize why it isn’t being detected by traditional economic indicators, the president’s team has settled on a different solution—experimenting with different economic messaging.

As the general election fast approaches, Team Biden is rolling out a new economic argument that, in the words of POLITICO’s Adam Cancryn, “tries to frame former President Donald Trump as the candidate of corporate tax cuts and Biden as a scourge of the ultra-wealthy.”

But Biden is no scourge of the ultrawealthy. In fact, he is a dear friend and ally of the wealthy cronies and plutocrats that make up the worst of America’s upper classes.

More...

https://mises.org/wire/bidens-absurd-new-economic-messaging-strategy 

Well, we did warn readers that anyone hoping for a negative print in an election year would be disappointed, and moments ago the BLS proved us right.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/january-jobs-shocker-payrolls-explode-353k-double-expected-and-higher-all-estimate-wages 

Does anybody actually believe what comes out of Biden's Bureau of Labor Statistics?

https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1752502655270666324?s=20 

Dear @BLS_gov
, since you have trouble finding actual data, we've made it easy for you - here are the layoffs announced in the past few months:

1. Twitch: 35% of workforce
2. Hasbro: 20% of workforce
3. Spotify: 17% of workforce
4. Levi's: 15% of workforce
5. Zerox: 15% of workforce
6. Qualtrics: 14% of workforce
7. Wayfair: 13% of workforce
8. Duolingo: 10% of workforce
9. Washington Post: 10% of workforce
10. eBay: 9% of workforce
11. Business Insider: 8% of workforce
12. Paypal: 7% of workforce
13. Charles Schwab: 6% of workforce
14. UPS: 2% of workforce
15. Blackrock: 3% of workforce
16. Citigroup: 20,000 employees
17. Pixar: 1,300 employees
[/b]


January Jobs Shocker: Payrolls Explode By 353K, Double The Expected And Higher Than All Estimate As Wages Surge

by Tyler Durden
Friday, Feb 02, 2024 - 08:55 AM

RayR wrote:

Where did you get that data?

Abrignac wrote:

Wall Street Journal.
Rates have been artificially depressed until the Fed raised them. For like ten years or so. We all got addicted to cheap money compared to historical rate trends. (Wish I could post graphs.

rfenst wrote:

Wall Street Journal.
Rates have been artificially depressed until the Fed raised them. For like ten years or so. We all got addicted to cheap money compared to historical rate trends. (Wish I could post graphs.

rfenst wrote:

We sometimes think that the honchos at the BLS and other government statistical mills had a previous career selling swampland in Florida. After all, they often want you to believe absolutely preposterous things such as their latest report claiming the battle against inflation has been won—with the Fed’s favorite PCE deflator coming in at a below target 1.65% annualized rate in Q4.

So with the inflation genie allegedly back in the 2.00% bottle, the pot-banging on Wall Street has gotten downright shrill. According to the toddlers in the gambling pits, the Fed should make haste to crank-up its printing presses again, and right soon.

Then again, the wondrous disappearance of inflation reported in the PCE deflator does need some ‘splainin’. That’s because the 1.65% headline gain consisted of some fairly discordant sub-components:

More...

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/01/david-stockman/another-inflation-whopper-from-the-bls-puzzle-palace/ 

remember when Trump begged for rates to go below zero on national TV?


edit: that's actually a thing

frankj1 wrote:

On the surface, it was an blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in January the US unexpectedly added 353K "jobs" - the most since January 2023 (when the print was 482K compared to 131K) , double the consensus forecast of 185K and more than the highest Wall Street estimate (300K from Natixis). In fact, this was a 4-sigma beat to estimate, unheard of in the past year.

The headline data was stellar across the board, starting with the unemployment rate which once again failed to rise - denying expectations from "Sahm's Rule" that a recession may have already started - all the way to average hourly earnings, which unexpectedly spiked from 4.1% (pre-revision) to 4.5%, the highest since last September, and a slap in the face to the Fed's disinflation narrative...

... or it would be if one didn't think of checking how the average rose: well, it turns out that, since average hourly earnings is a fraction, it did not rise due to a jump in actual wages but - since it is earnings over a period of time - "rose" because the BLS decided to sharply slash the number of estimated hours that everyone was working, from 34.3 to just 34.1, which may not sound like a lot until one realizes that the last time the workweek was this low was when the economy was shut down during covid. Excluding the covid lockdowns, one would have to go back to 2010 to find a workweek that was this anemic.

And speaking of revisions, we had a lot of those: in January, the BLS conducted its annual "annual re-benchmarking and update of seasonal adjustment factors." Long story short, what was until December a decline in jobs has now been miraculously transformed into gains, as shown in the chart below.

More...

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/inside-most-ridiculous-jobs-report-recent-history 

Where is the recession?

rfenst wrote:

Large minorities of Americans are pessimistic about the state of the U.S. economy — even as key indicators reveal promising signs of growth, according to a new poll.

Nearly half, 45%, of Americans believe the economy is getting worse, according to a YouGov poll released Jan. 10.

The poll surveyed 1,593 U.S. adult citizens between Jan. 7 and Jan. 9 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

Additionally, 40% of respondents rated the economy as “poor,” while 41% said the U.S. is currently in a recession.

When it comes to personal finances, responses were similarly gloomy, with 40% of respondents saying they are worse off financially than one year ago.

The poll is just the latest in a string of surveys revealing widespread dissatisfaction with the state of personal finances and the broader economy.

Nearly 70% of respondents to a Suffolk University poll released in September said the economy is heading in the wrong direction.

Similarly, 71% of respondents said the U.S. economy is “not so good” or “poor” in a Quinnipiac University poll released in August. The poll questioned 1,818 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

https://news.yahoo.com/41-americans-us-recession-poll-141722373.html 

Where is the recession?

rfenst wrote:

We’ve been in a rolling recession for a while.

HockeyDad wrote:

CRE!

You can't lockdown the entire nation and not have some residual effect to it.

Malls = ghost towns

Downtowns = ghost towns

Any high rise USA = ghost towns


"Someone" is paying for the heat/air, cafeteria, dry cleaning, gyms at most corporate work places. Work from home isn't the "thing" needed. Where I work they estimate they're only getting 60% productivity from the work from homers. They sent out letters the past few weeks notifying them that the train is leaving the station. With or without them. They're NOT playing. I've been privvy to decisions on how to deal with the mass layoffs if they have to go there.

DrMaddVibe wrote:

Keynesians never say I’m sorry—they just make excuses until they can cherry-pick data to show that their destructive policies are working. In this respect our tiresome Keynesian school-marm, Janet Yellen, was in fine fettle upon the Friday jobs report, announcing that a “soft landing” had been achieved. Everything is now hunky-dory on main street, said she, because wages were up by 4.1% versus an estimated 3.2% rise in headline inflation for the 2023.

Let’s see. Here are the values for average hourly wages and the headline CPI indexed to December 2020. As it has transpired, since Yellen and the Biden puppeteers purportedly took over economic policy, the cost of living (black line) has risen 25% more than the average hourly wage (purple line).

[GRAPH]

Then again, our paint-by-the-numbers monetary central planners apparently believe that the world starts anew every month, quarter and year and that there is no such thing as the actual level of wages and prices. It’s all about the short-run rate of change. Since the inflationary battering of wages that has been underway for several years is now purportedly in the rearview mirror, apparently it just didn’t happen.

More...

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/02/david-stockman/why-keynesians-never-say-sorry/