Look, let’s not pretend like Donald Trump is in a position to make subtle arguments about why Friday’s October jobs print was actually “mixed” or at least better than the headline numbers suggested.
And furthermore, let’s not pretend like Donald Trump has any conception of the extent to which these numbers are still distorted by the hurricanes.
Because pretending like this President has done a deep-dive into the numbers and has developed a list of plausible arguments for why the report was actually upbeat is laughable, as is the proposition that he knows anything at all about how weather affects the data.
So given that, we’re left to assume that Trump is now tweeting a screengrab of Fox’s coverage of the NFP report just because the font is huge and there’s a green arrow involved. To wit:
This is blatant propaganda. The jobs report missed everything.
That giant yellow figure in the Fox “alert” falls smack in the middle of estimates from 81 economists (the range was 120k-400k) and missed the consensus by a country mile.
Meanwhile, the AHE number was an abysmal miss that raises fresh questions about the trajectory of inflation, although again, all of this comes with the caveat that this data is noisy.
This might seem trivial to you, but it’s not. His base (so, a lot of the people who would have seen that tweet) know even less about these numbers than he does. All they see is a big, yellow “261,000” with an even bigger green “up” arrow in the background. That tweet suggests that this was an upside surprise when in fact, it was the exact opposite.
At best, this report was meaningless and at worst, it was nothing but noise with very little in the way of bright spots.
The jobs report was definitely a huge nothing-burger – not that complicated – just look at the bond market – more flattening.
You know what else is a nothing-burger? the term nothing-burger.
To answer your question, Murphy: Your deranged bookmark in the oval.
lol, agree with that. No, it’s kinda like just overused every damned day, how many times a day to hear it or read it. And on that same line of thought, just count the number of times a day you hear someone say “at the end of the day…” or even worse, professional personalities who are interviewed all the time and how many times they say “Uh” when they make their remarks. omg.
…and once again, the birth/death adjustment, contributed bigly to the total. This BLS’ WAG statistic added 216,000 jobs to the non-seasonally adjusted figures, making up the bulk of job gains in October. As seems to have been the case in most of the recent reports, from this casual observer’s perspective…