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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (606157)	8/19/2004 1:19:26 PM
From: Enam Luf	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

imho, the market is ripe for a rebound. oil prices cannot sustain their current irrationally levels, which are grossly out of step with fundamental supply and demand. If prices come down quickly, we could get a nice spike to growth. the only real potential risk is something awful occurring in Saudi Arabia. not sure if things will rebound meaningfully enough before the election to help bush though.

To: jlallen who wrote (606157)	8/19/2004 1:22:00 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Jobless rate: slashed by the "plug factor" "Plug Factor," a statistical adjustment used to capture small-business job creation overlooked by the BLS's standard surveys. Until 2000, it was set at 35,000 per month. Now the plug factor regularly reaches 300,000.... ...It turned out that virtually two-thirds of the new jobs had come not from the survey, but from a new computer model. For decades, the BLS has aimed at small businesses when measuring job creation in times of recovery, especially those not captured by its established monthly survey. Until 2000, this statistical adjustment was fixed at 35,000 each month, called the "plug factor." The recent sudden jump in these figures towards 300,000 each month results from a computer model based on a calculated "net birth/death adjustment," which is supposed to measure how many jobs small firms have created and shuttered. In this way, the former monthly 35,000 figure exploded into numbers that are almost 10 times greater. For us, the sudden statistical spike in job creation during March-May was massively out of whack with prior numbers and other concurrent economic data to be credible. Then came June: 112,000 new jobs created, less than half the expected number. We never saw it mentioned that the net birth/death adjustment contributed 182,000 to this disappointing increase. Without it, employment would have fallen 70,000. Message 20423102