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To: Alex who wrote (26074)	1/13/1999 12:10:00 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116786

Quite a game of chicken they have going on down there in Brazil. Or should we say Politico-economic blackmail by Brazil's former president, now governor of that "deadbeat" province. Get the leftists to side with you and you now have the potential for a serious look into the "pit". Hope none of them wish to have their names carved in the history books as the ones who brought down the global financial order. What power these guys have right now... and they know it!!! Regards, Ron

To: Alex who wrote (26074)	1/13/1999 12:13:00 AM
From: Lalit Jain	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116786

Glitch Causes Early Release of Economic Data By Tim Smart Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 13, 1999; Page E1 For the second time in three months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics yesterday prematurely released key economic data by posting it on the Internet. A computer glitch resulted in the early release of the department's report on prices charged by producers of finished goods last month and last year – information that was not due to be published until today and that could be worth millions of dollars to stock and bond traders fortunate enough to spot it. That foul-up followed the premature release in November of the October unemployment figures. Economists, however, said there was no indication that the mistake played any part in yesterday's broad stock market decline, which traders attributed to profit-taking and a correction in the values of some Internet and technology stocks. The average price charged by manufacturers and other producers of goods in the United States rose by a sharp 0.4 percent in December, the largest increase in 14 months. However that increase was principally attributed to a 30.7 percent surge in the wholesale price of cigarettes. Tobacco companies have been raising cigarette prices to offset the costs of settling multibillion-dollar lawsuits. Overall for 1998, the department's producer price index fell 0.1 percent, after a 1.2 percent drop in 1997, marking the first back-to-back annual declines in the index since the government began compiling it in 1947. "Inflation is under control," said Chris Varvares, president of Macroeconomic Advisers in St. Louis. In recent months, increases in two products that are not consumed by everyone – prescription drugs and cigarettes – have led to increases in the monthly rate of the index. Without the cigarette price increase, and excluding the volatile food and energy sectors, the index declined 0.1 percent in December, BLS experts said. If drugs and cigarettes are taken out of the yearly numbers, a BLS economist said, the decline for 1998 would have been 1.9 percent. The inadvertent release of the PPI, agency officials said, appeared to be caused by a computer program flaw. Bureau senior economist William Parks said the agency discovered the inadvertent posting on the its Web site (stats.bls.gov) yesterday sometime after 1 p.m. and believes the data was available to the public for about 90 minutes. That was when the agency removed the information temporarily, then decided to release it again at about 5 p.m. Government economic officials go to great lengths to prohibit the premature release of key economic data, such as that reflecting employment and inflation levels, because changes in the data can affect the value of stocks and bonds, and traders can act upon the information. The December PPI was scheduled for release at 8:30 this morning. "It was a flawed programming design," Parks said. "It was not human error. Our systems people are looking at it." In November, when the employment numbers were released inadvertently, "that was more the case of somebody pushing a button," Parks said. At that time, BLS Commissioner Katharine G. Abraham termed the glitch "a serious failure of management control" and explained that it occurred when a staffer loaded the data onto an internal agency computer not realizing it would be transmitted instantly to the World Wide Web. The release was not the first premature delivery of sensitive economic data. In January 1997, Federal Reserve Board report on economic conditions around the country was released two hours ahead of schedule because no one had informed the Fed's computer specialists that the release time for the information had been pushed back two hours from its prior noon release. © Copyright The Washington Post Company newsweek.com