As MarketWatch.com reported, "The dollar
rallied against major counterparts early on
Friday, after the September employment report
showed an in-line gain of 110,000 and large upward
revisions of previous months."
I couldn't
believe my eyes! What!?! A gain of jobs? I had the
same dumbfounded look of utter stupefaction upon
being told that consumer confidence was up, too.
Huh? What? Huh?
George Ure at
UrbanSurvival.com notes that some of the details
were that, "only 14,000 construction jobs were
officially lost, while
manufacturing dropped 18,000.
Services on the other hand were up 143,000. Doing
what? Who knows?" Hahaha! Pretty mysterious!
And I note that the Birth-Death Model is
used to estimate the number of new jobs created
and jobs lost that have not shown up in official
data because they are so new, or maybe it is used
to estimate the number of jobs that were born and
which then killed another job by strangling it,
maybe even murder-suicide things, or something to
do with O J Simpson and a knife. Who knows?
Anyway, the important thing is that the
Birth-Death Model can usually be counted upon to
add bunches of jobs, and has added more than
100,000 jobs a month since May 2005, but this time
it added only 17,000 jobs, the second lowest
number of new jobs since that selfsame May 2006 so
long, long ago.
And most of the jobs lost
were in "leisure and hospitality", but the
categories of "construction" and "manufacturing"
were actually up in the Birth-Death Model! This is
truly surprising, in that Challenger Gray &
Christmas estimated that in September, mortgage
lenders, construction companies and real estate
firms fired a total of 27,169 people. And as bad
as that sounds, it was actually better than in
August, when the number totaled 35,752.
But manufacturing was up! Up! Wow! This
means that more people are working in heavy
industry, but there are less people going out
after work for a drink to complain about their
bosses and plot righteous revenge against their
fellow office workers for being so rude to you
that they only had a lousy birthday party for you,
with some stupid cake and gag presents instead of
the new car that you really wanted and hinted at
all freaking week?
Well, Addison Wiggin at
The 5 Min. Forecast is not "into" getting drunk
and planning revenge, no matter how righteous or
deserved, but noted that, "What's more, the sector
that the Labor Department forgot to mention?
Government jobs! In their revision, the BLS added
57,000 government jobs in August, up from the
originally reported loss of 28,000." I say
"Yikes!", but Mr Wiggin will only allow himself a
thoughtful, "Hmmmm ..."
After thinking
about it a bit, he apparently realized that this
was clearly insufficient, and expanded on that by
saying, "The jobs report is bogus. If you suffered
through the BLS official site, for example, you'd
find they allow themselves a margin of error of
129,000 jobs. Any deviation less and you're in an
area that statisticians called insignificant
'noise'." Hahaha! You're right!
John
Williams, he of the famous ShadowStats.com,
probably for these and other reasons, opines that
the September jobs data from the Labor Department
"cannot be believed".
And another thing
that is unbelievable concerning inflation in
prices is the mental disconnect about oil. Kevin
Capp, in the Rude Awakening newsletter, writes
that the latest report from the International
Energy Agency shows that Peak Oil is here, we are
all freaking doomed, and we should be running down
the street screaming our guts out in mortal fear,
completely nude if you want, but wearing some good
footwear since scuffing up your bare feet would be
just adding insult to injury.
Although
they did not use those words exactly, he reports
that the agency did say that, "the global
production of liquids dropped by 854,000 barrels
per day from August 2006-August 2007".
My
British sense of bathroom humor rises to the fore
and I shout out, "854,000 barrels of liquids?
Hell, I probably pee that much every night, as I
have to get up about every two hours to go to the
damned bathroom! Hahaha!"
Alas, neither my
unfortunate urinary situation nor my little joke
were appreciated, maybe because it was too clever
for them, or the fact that I was eating a
beef-n-bean burrito at the same time, and my words
were probably both mumbled and my breath more
fragrant. For whatever reason, nobody even smiled
at my pathetic attempt at humor, and he goes on to
say, "In addition, we're pumping out 1.53 million
barrels per day less than the all-time high of
86.13 million extracted in July 2006. Translation:
The sun may have already set on our ability to
meet world demand."
Naturally, I say "Who
in the hell is 'our', as in 'our ability to meet
world demand'?"
I could immediately tell
by the way the other journalists and reporters
were sniggling and laughing at me that he meant
"our" in the manner of "the Earth's ability" to
supply oil, and I was real embarrassed, which soon
turned to anger, and soon thereafter I was angrily
trying to tear a piece off of my chair to use as a
club.
Mr Capp says, "This is not good,"
and I said through clenched teeth, "As soon as I
get my opposable thumbs around a truncheon made
from a part of this chair, it'll be fine!", but I
could tell by his tone that when he said, "This is
not good," he meant that, "Running that close to
the bone means any systemic shock - a hurricane
that damages drilling platforms in the Gulf, a
terrorist attack on oil pipelines in Nigeria, an
unexpected cold snap in the northeast - could
cause prices to skyrocket, impacting everything
from costs at the pump to costs at the grocery
store."
And if there is one thing you can
count on, something will happen, because it always
does when you have no margin for error, and the
price for acting with such stupidity is always
heavy, too.
Richard Daughty is
general partner and COO for Smith Consultant
Group, serving the financial and medical
communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru
economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to
heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve
it.
Republished with permission from The Daily Reckoning.
Copyright 2007, The Daily
Reckoning.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
