Economists had been expecting 215,000 after storms and strikes led to much-worse-than-expected growth in October.  | Economy
  • SJ0English
    4·
    12 days ago

    I have warned about this with respect to these numbers before, and I’m going to warn about them again: you really can’t trust the employment numbers right now. The amount of downward revisions in the past 2 years is absurd, including one 800,000 job downward revision prior to the election. It’s entirely possible and even probable that these numbers will be revised further downwards.

    What I actually expect is for a lot of numbers to keep looking better than they really are until about January 20th. And then suddenly a whole bunch of stuff is going to end up looking the way it really is…

      • SJ0English
        2·
        6 days ago

        All the doctored numbers are saying the economy is great, inflation is great, employment is great.

        It’s not true, and anyone who actually lives on planet earth and doesn’t have their butler doing the shopping knows it.

        I expect that the moment a party the bureaucrats don’t want to prop up is fully in power the numbers will reflect reality and magically suddenly everything will be horrible oh my god the numbers are saying the world is ending and it’s all Trump’s fault!

        I might sound conspiratorial, but if you have a situation where in 11 of 12 months there are downward revisions on data that the government and central banks really need to be better to justify what they want to do, I think that is inherently suspicious. Given that something absurd like 80% of political donations go to the presently outgoing party, I feel there’s a reasonable expectation of where the bias is coming from.

        I’ll say I could be wrong, maybe everything really is fine and all the numbers will continue to be great in February, but every signal that doesn’t have duct tape over it is screaming massive recession and yet the numbers keep showing everything is awesome. It’s like if you tape your speedometer at 55, it doesn’t mean you’re not doing 90, and you can hear the motor revving, you can see everything moving faster, you can hear the wind rushing up against the windows, but the gauge says 55 so you must be going 55!

        Consumer debt levels are going crazy, the yield curve has been inverted for a while now, house sales are crashing in some key markets, auto sales are way down, there are mass layoffs at many companies, but according to the number line goes up.

        • realcaseyrollins@thelemmy.clubOPEnglish
          2·
          6 days ago

          Ah I see. Yes I agree. And the longer we pretend that there isn’t a recession, the worse the crash will be, because there will be farther to fall.

          Trump is in a sticky situation (which TBF he put us in with those COVID stimulus checks, not that Biden helped the situation at all). Usually collapses are triggered by 1) an unsound economic foundation 2) one of the pillars holding up the economy collapsing in some way. Something like dramatic job losses or foreclosures could cause a crash, which is needed to correct the economy, so Trump get by if he finds a way to keep something like that from happening. But usually it happens suddenly, when people don’t expect it, so I don’t trust that he’ll be able to do that. It’s not like Obama or Bush were able to prevent economic crashes during their terms either.