Your statements are extreme. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy for the numbers to be massaged and misleading. I'll tell you that I see exactly this same kind of thing within my own team at work. What happens is this. We get into a new major process problem, which we model and dig into the numbers on. Then my team comes up with a good way to measure trends and forecasts for the process, so that we can manage that area of the business. Included in those models are assumptions, correlations, etc, that are based on statistical analysis. However, common sense assumptions can sometimes skew the results. Sometimes, you see spikes that make no sense, so when you dig in, you find that your assumptions aren't as good as you thought or you find that those spikes are just that...something to be ignored in the overall trend analysis.
That's no conspiracy theory and it's no one on my team deliberately misleading anyone. Rather, it is just the nature of modeling and forecasting. What I've learned to do over the decades I've been doing this is to make sure I and my team are solidly grounded in the raw data. So we may present the smoothed, modeled numbers to the senior execs, but we'll have already looked at the raw numbers and trends to make sure there was nothing unusual going on.
So in the case of these Unemployment Rate numbers, I will tell you that my experience says the downward blip in Unemployment in September is not part of a beneficial trend in this country. The raw data scream very loudly that the published numbers give to the public are aberrations and smoothed. We have rot in the system that their model is simply not capturing.
That has investment implications for anyone who cares enough to pay attention. There's no conspiracy here, but there is a very loud message in what is going on. |
