Yup, the are playing the confidence game they best they can with consistently bad numbers. The underlying fundamentals and what is driving unemployment have not changed since the downturn started. Eventually, the market will have to look down again and we will get another round of panic.
This guy does a really good job of dissecting the job numbers. This is from earlier this month for May.
As before, my assumption is that these numbers are quite fuzzy, not worth the paper they are printed on, and heavily falsified to achieve narrow political and market influencing aims.
While I can certainly understand, and even find some compassion for, the desire to manipulate the data to inject some confidence and optimism into the populace and markets, I must regretfully conclude that such efforts are more damaging than helpful.
We did ourselves no favors by fibbing to ourselves during the blowing of the credit bubble, and we do ourselves no favors by repeating that behavior now. We need good and believable data. I judge that our markets would respond better in the long run to believable data, and that we actually owe it to ourselves to provide the most honest and accurate assessments of reality that we can.
