Last week, when initial US jobless claims abruptly spiked to the highest since October of 2021, I suggested the accompanying hullabaloo was overwrought.
I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the vast majority of what you read across the mainstream financial media, and particularly what’s printed across sundry macro-themed tabloids and parroted by the bear crowd on finance-focused “X” accounts, is just mindless bullsh-t aimed solely at generating engagement, which is to say monetizable web impressions.
Everyone claims to understand that — and despise it — but everyone’s lying to themselves in that regard, and in a lot of other regards besides.
I was parked on Bloomberg’s CPI live blog last Thursday when the claims number came out. The instant reactions from Bloomberg’s columnists and various professionals who I suppose were solicited for comment on their terminal chats, were remarkable for the willingness to pronounce upon the numbers without so much as a quick, five-second scan of the actual release, which plainly suggested the uptick was a fluke. Not only that, there was virtually no mention in that initial “coverage” of the fact that the data covered a holiday week.
Within five or so minutes, the tone shifted to reflect the anomalous nature of the print — Bloomberg’s bloggers and some of the folks they were chatting with started backfilling the nuance. Of course, by then it was too late. The narrative was this: “Jobless Claims Surge To Four-Year High.” That’s what “sells,” and that’s all that matters. The point isn’t to inform. And even if it was, that’d be impossible because attention spans are compressed such that anything longer than a sentence or two is “TL;DR.”
If you’ve ever typed “TL;DR” and you weren’t lamenting what that mentality (the “TL;DR” mentality) says about society, you and I wouldn’t get along. In the same vein, if you haven’t read a physical book — a whole one, cover to cover — in the past month, you and I wouldn’t get along either. I mean that. We wouldn’t get along, regardless of how much else we might have in common. Because I’d think you hopeless. And guess what? I’d be right.
With all of that in mind, last week’s supposedly epochal surge in US jobless claims disappeared into the late-summer haze on Thursday, when the government said initial filers for the week to September 13 were 231,000, down 33,000 from the prior week.
As the figure shows, the prior week’s dramatic uptick was reversed and then some. As in: It’s all gone now, plus 5,000 (or minus 5,000, I guess).
Continuing claims for the week to September 6 were 1.92 million, below estimates and the fewest since May.
My first thought when I saw the initial claims drop was that Bloomberg would bury the headline because it’s not bearish enough to generate reader interest, but then it occurred to me that good news can be effective at generating engagement too as long as it’s amenable to what I call “factual hyperbole,” which is just what it sounds like: Dramatized facts.
Sure enough, Thursday’s claims print scored an above-the-fold slot on Bloomberg’s homepage with this headline: “US Initial Jobless Claims Drop by Most in Almost Four Years.”
Here’s the thing (and this presages the new Monthly Letter, which is forthcoming): In most cases, we’d all be far better off without the constant connection to “news.” We’re being pushed, pulled and whipsawed every second of every day and it’s driving us crazy as a society, in case you haven’t noticed.
This time last week, US jobless claims were “surging” by the most in almost four years. Fast forward seven days and claims are “plunging” by — wait for it — the most in almost four years.
Might I gently suggest we could’ve saved ourselves some precious sanity by ignoring these prints for the noise that they are. Oh wait: I did suggest that when I wrote, on September 11, that “whenever you see something that looks like an anomaly, it’s probably anomalous.” “This release,” I said of last week’s claims readout, “is a throwaway.”
Anyway, for those of you who made it this far — 700 words, most of them admittedly superfluous — it’s worth noting that this claims print covered NFP survey week for September.
Looking forward to the next monthly. FWIW, I had to google the meaning of TLDR. I can’t imagine that any of your subscribers have an aversion to reading in the long form or reading actual books- but what do I know.
“Now, y’all who’re without sin can cast the first stone”.
Reading Heisenberg Report “cover-to-cover” counts as reading a book each month.
I just finished a real banger. “Lost Vegas: The Redneck Riviera, Existentialist Conversations with Strippers, and the World Series of Poker” by Paul McGuire. It covers Pauly’s time in the mid-aughts working as a reporter covering the WSOP. He’s an acquaintance of mine, and I always meant to read it but never got around until now. If you need any persuading why it would be a terrible idea to become a poker pro, it’ll do the trick.
Incidentally, an HR Book Club would be one hell of an idea…
ooo … books, movies, music … bring it!
Actually, same … I’ve seen it before in certain chats I am a part of, but never felt the need to understand what it meant (which may say as much about me as the person posting it).
I stopped Facebook when Trump 1 started. I quit chat rooms at the start of Biden. I deleted Twitter when Musk took over. I quite Bluesky when Trump 2 started. I quit Discord this week. None of the ‘information’ I gleaned from social media helped my endeavor to profitable trading. In fact, it hurt my results at every turn. Any and every trade entry starts out as a 50-50 proposition. Nothing the Bloomberg writers can do to reduce that probability.
Having moved from NYC to care for my crippled surviving parent, the loss of my precious book-reading time on the subway has been a terrible blow. I was reading ~30 books a year. Now I’m lucky to finish 5. Fact is, with all the new pressures to make a living this way, care for someone entirely dependent on me and have a few hours after the bell to sit quietly and absorb long-format is extremely difficult. By 9pm, I’m exhausted. Take care of your minds and hearts folks. It may be a long few decades ahead.
I quit all the socials when I realized what it was doing to my mental health. I’m much happier since.
It occurred to me that when TV shows want to portray an unstable stalker type, the police find a room with newspaper clippings, photos, etc that the perp has been obsessing over. Very creepy. Also, pretty much the average social media algorithmic feed
This is why professional street economists caution against using 1 week or 1 monthly data print and focus on 3 or 6 data points with moving averages. There are too many ways for a single piece of data to be distorted. That said, it still looks like much of the data points to a continued slowdown. But that does not mean 100% of the data shows it. And it does not mean for sure we are going into a recession. We are in a time of rapid technological and structural change.
Previous week’s claims spike was all TX, a clue that something was awry, which I think was a surge in allegedly fraudulent claims ahead of a flood-related deadline.
The Economist published an article a couple of weeks back discussing how humans are reading less every year. The article recounted, among other interesting anecdotes, one of a university literature professor who had to stop teaching “Bleak House” to his English majors because most simply could not get through it. Many young people consider reading boring and are ostensibly shocked others might read for leisure. I will not be surprised if reading falls further out of fashion and practice, combine that with the rise of AI and it is hard to imagine anything other than accelerating brain rot across our species.
Per National Literary Institute (and U.S. DOE):
21% of U.S. adults are illiterate
54% of U.S. adults read below a 6th grade level
44% of U.S. adults do not read a book in a year
English in general and fiction in particular (as well as history) have been systematically de-emphasized in American primary schools for awhile now. I got a bit obsessed about it when my kids started school.
The exact cause is varied and includes everything from efforts to increase STEM (there’s only so much time in a day) to the expansion of the ADA to include mental health (IEP culture) to new theories on early childhood education (whole language versus phonics) to the rise of identitarian politics (history and literature get combined through 1st person historical fiction) to the general societal erosion of attention spans (excerpts only) and gamification of education (edtech).
The road to hell is almost always paved by good intentions.