Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 10:17
trotsky (bureau of lies and statistics...) ID#377387:
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a political agency, that doesn't produce 'statistics', but simply pulls data out of a hat to please its political masters. the labor sec. Elaine Chao ( sp.? ) remarked: "well, the good news is that the headline rate dropped to 6.2%...". in fact, this is NOT 'good' , or even otherwise, 'news'. rather, it has no informational content whatsoever. the bureaucrats at BLS, always mindful of what their political masters want to hear, simply shrank the total labor force again, by an astounding 500,000+ people. presumably, those were swallowed by the earth since the last jobs report ONE MONTH AGO.
in economic statistics, there are two realities: one is the real world, captured in part by stuff like GAAP earnings, the trade imbalance, the reams of footnotes in earnings reports, capacity utilization, and some of the nominal sectoral data produced by the commerce dept. ( the 'real world' however never finds its way into commerce's GDP stats ) .
the other reality is what the government's minions cook up by way of 'politically correct' statistics out of the available data. simply put, their output is completely useless. there isn't a single report ( aside from e.g. the trade deficit, where the nominal numbers are cited ) that can be accepted at face value; one ALWAYS has to delve into the details to get a vague idea of what really happened. in some cases, one has to resort to calculations of one's own. the worst examples of this data distortion game are inflation, GDP and jobs data. in short, the MOST IMPORTANT economic data sets are the least reliable, and in fact represent a complete mirage...they describe an economic utopia that doesn't exist. |
