I passed on writing my typical D-Day post yesterday, in part because of the way our president politicized the 80th anniversary of this historic event and turned it into a Ukraine pep rally, which made me want to vomit.
You’d expect as much from an obviously addled sort who thinks, despite all available evidence, that his relative was eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea during World War II, and more recently twice noted in an interview that he has known Vlad Putin for “over 40 years.”
Now that’s a Russian collusion tale worthy of investigation by the Biden Secret Police considering back then Putin was a relatively unknown KGB officer. So what was a minor league U.S. Senator, which Biden was at the time, doing consorting with a KGB agent?
I’d love to hear that explanation, other than the stereotypical Joe is losing his mental faculties and we can’t hold him accountable for things like mishandling classified information because of that.
We also can’t, presumably, hold Biden accountable for anything that happens during his watch as president. We can, however, blame his predecessor, Donald Trump, for all Biden calamities, including a southern border only slightly less porous than Ukraine’s ground defenses.
But Biden and his brain-donor supporters aren’t alone in claiming long-term residence at the irrational hotel.
Today’s major dose of irrational behavior centered on the monthly jobs reports, an exercise in reading goat entrails that no one should take seriously, yet investment professionals do month after month.
Understand that these days government statistics tend to be guesses and results issued by statistical models, which are themselves mostly guesses, seasoned with a bit of research.
If you made observations based on similar models, a neighbor buying a new car might cause you to state that car sales are going through the roof, and we might be in for a record sales year.
Government inflation reports are excellent examples of useless numbers. Some exclude “volatile” items such as food and energy, which just happen to be two elements necessary to life as we know it.
Our Federal Reserve, still trying to meet its target of reducing inflation to 2 percent annually, loves an inflation measure which does not include housing costs. Understandably, this might be accurate if all residents were Section 8 types or illegal immigrants, not responsible for paying their housing costs. For the rest of us, housing is a cost just as essential as those for food and/or energy.
Today’s job report roared past estimates, to a reported 272,000 more on payrolls.
Of note, the “job” numbers don’t differentiate between full-time and part-time. I lose a job paying $60,000 a year with good benefits, and two kids down the street get hired on to cut grass part-time during the summer for $10 an hour and that’s a net gain as far as the government is concerned.
Similarly, if I lost the above-mentioned job, but took down two of those part-time jobs, again a net gain on the payroll report.
Further complicating things, the 270,000 gain was from the so-called “Establishment” report, that deals with feedback from businesses and adjusts it all with the birth-death model to smooth the numbers.
The births and deaths refer not to workers, but to businesses who employ people. It is ESTIMATED how many of these companies have opened or closed (were born or died) during the month.
Meanwhile, the household survey, which talks to people and extrapolates based on that, came in at a DECLINE of 408,000 workers.
And, just to spice up the statistical sundae, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4 percent, which would seem to indicate fewer, nor more jobs.
There is a difference of roughly 9 MILLION between jobs numbers the establishment survey reports. vs. the numbers of the household survey, with the establishment that much higher.
Based on this ridiculous statistical soup, billions of dollars were made or lost Friday.
Next week, we get the monthly Federal Reserve meetings and interest rates announcement, usually good for more unwarranted volatility in financial markets as the irrational react and overreact on vague, generally meaningless numbers.
Meantime, we can amuse ourselves with more absurd Biden musings, of which there almost certainly will be many.
Sam Ross Jr's site 