<a soft job number might be in order tomorrow>
I think the "any monkey can play" ad hoc policy playbook goes like this. A month or so ago Greenspan cued the market there will be a surprise number "sometime". I think Poole the other day said they need something similar, "a surprise". When I sat waiting for the PPI sham report this morning, I thought to myself, how would these lying, deceiving shacks of shit do this perp? I thought, if they report much below 0.3% or 0.4% on the PPI in this environment of runaway input costs, even the lemmings might have questions. But, confident that they are well hidden behind the curtain, they pulled this 0.1% number out of their asses anyway. I guess people are still having too much fun (for now) to care.
The employment number: I'm thinking 185,000 might be safe, and marginally credible (like 0.4% PPI). They might be tempted to go for more, but then you might have to raise rates in May. They could say 350,000 and people would believe them, after all they believed 0.1%. So a bit more than 185k isn't out of the question, then they raise rates a measly, meaningless 25 bps in May and make the Europeans and Japanese happy. Plus you need to fabricate a good number because the dollar might collapse (especially as the Japanese may be off the case)if you had another major disappointment, and they don't want no stinkin collapse, just a gradual one.
BTW, I have spent hours wasting my time searching for the truth about the real economy, especially what prices are really doing. I'll match what I done on this score with anybody. If it's the truth in real time you want, the news is undeniably inflationary, across ALL goods including finished. On jobs, I use the Treasury Dept's withholding numbers, and this month they are looking largely like every other month, kind of pale around the gills. But so what, when you are engaged in permanent financial engineering you just enlist the Ministry of Propaganda, and worry about the consequences later.
Of course by May the world economy will be trashed by the Train Wreck anyway, but they will cross that bridge when they come to it and realize it (very late). |
