What a Wonderful World!

CNBC reports that government unemployment numbers are cooked to perfection!

“Something strange” (REALLY STRANGE) “has been happening with jobless numbers lately” says the CNBC headline. You know it is strange anytime the mainstream media starts agreeing with my longtime criticism of government reports, even using my blunt language—that “the books look cooked.” In fact, the Bidenomics unemployment claims reports don’t just look cooked, they look burned to a crisp.

CNBC just noted that five out of the last six jobless reports gave an identical reading of 212,000 new claims and quoted someone observing that the odds against that exact number happening over and over are astronomical. The Biden government has gotten so lazy and overconfident (because outfits like CNBC rarely take any report to task with investigative reporting or shrewd questioning) that the government is no longer even trying to hide its electioneering anymore. That or we really are living in times so peculiar that oddities are repeating on such a regular basis you’d think the matrix was short circuiting to let us see behind its weave of wires.

For five of the past six weeks, the level of initial jobless filings totaled exactly 212,000. Given a labor force that is 168 million strong, achieving such stasis seems at least unusual if not uncanny, yet that is what the figures released each Thursday morning since mid-March have shown….

“How is this statistically possible? Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number,” market veteran Jim Bianco, head of Bianco Research, posted Thursday on X.

“Initial claims for unemployment insurance are state programs, with 50 state rules, hundreds of offices, and 50 websites to file. Weather, seasonality, holidays, and economic vibrations drive the number of people filing claims from week to week,” he added. “Yet this measure is so stable that it does not vary by even 1,000 applications a week.”

Indeed, way beyond just peculiar.

Then, when Biden’s Labor Dept, which creates the reports, tries to justify its perfectly identical string of numbers as legitimate on the basis that the oddity occurred because of seasonal adjustments, some of the media leap to the department’s defense, explaining that the flawless match from week to week to week could not, therefore, be due to the books being cooked because it is all happening in the seasonal adjustments.

That’s when you know with certainty either the Labor Dept. is lazy in formulating its excuses, or it simply knows the financial media are lame enough to accept that excuse as reasonable and that the general reading public will also never do any actual thinking about what it reads but will with equal ease accept a completely impossible excuse as a rational explanation, too: CNBC, acknowledging the obvious problem of exactly matching numbers week after week, even praises the lame enablers as being “analytical”:

However, others offered more analytical thoughts, attributing the uniformity in data to seasonal adjustments. Tracey Ryniec, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research, suggested: “You can go look at each state Jim. Those vary greatly.”

Oh, sure. That explains it: The jobless claim numbers that come out of each individual state vary greatly; therefore, the perfect uniformity in the final collective analysis must obviously come from properly adjusting each state for its seasonal differences. As if that even makes a shred of sense.

Indeed, a Labor Department spokesperson noted that while the string of 212,000 prints on the jobless claims data is “uncommon,” it would not be considered anomalous.

Not in that department it wouldn’t. In fact, a perfect conformity in attaining the desired results would seem commonplace over there.

Of course, the numbers from each state vary greatly. That’s the point! All the alignment happens in “adjustments” made by the federal government. That’s where human-contrived suppositions and theories allow infinite creative reasons to tweak the raw state numbers up or down. Are we supposed to be stupid enough to believe the weather all those weeks was perfectly consistent enough to dial those widely varying, raw state numbers exactly in to 212,000 jobless claims across the nation each week?

Clearly the book cooking is never likely to be at the broad state level because that includes red states as much as blue states and would require all states to conspire together. So, OF COURSE, the book cooking would happen in the seasonal adjustments made at the national level, which is an accusation I’ve been leveling all the time in the last few months and fairly frequently going back many years.

The streak “can be reasonably interpreted as an indication that there has been very little volatility in initial claims over this period relative to historical patterns, and that the seasonal adjustment factors are effectively removing seasonality from the aggregate figures reported by states,” the official said.

They really do believe we’re all dumb as to accept such circular reasoning! What the streak can be reasonably interpreted as showing us is that the seasonal adjustments are, themselves, constantly being adjusted in order to arrive at 212,000 claims, no matter how much the raw numbers vary and how much seasons vary from one state to the next. It is impossible (or improbable beyond measure) that, with seasons hitting so many states at different weeks in the year with such large variations of hot and cold extremes (such as the current drought conditions in the Washington state with severe rain, snow and flooding in California) that the seasonal adjustments would change the raw numbers (sometimes by several hundred thousand claims!) to land exactly at an aggregate of 212,000 jobs added each time!

No, that blatantly reveals goal seeking—goal seeking that is so obvious I have wondered for months why no one in the big financial media was even raising an eyebrow about these job numbers. When it happens twice in a row, you raise an eyebrow and call it out as I have from time to time. When it happens five times in a row? It just finally got to be so many times that even the willing parrots of the Fed and feds at CNBC couldn’t keep their mouths shut about it.

The raw numbers versus the “seasonally adjusted” numbers look like this:

It looks like, until March, they tried to keep a few wiggles in the adjusted numbers they reported to make things look real, though I doubted all along that such huge adjustments could be vindicated. Then, since March, they got lazy and decided they didn’t even need to try to fake reality. That is what I concluded from the graph where it suddenly flatlines BEFORE I even read the following:

The Labor Department official also pointed out that new seasonal factors to the claims data were announced a month ago.

Oh, well maybe that explains the sudden noticeable shift to that hobgoblin of small minds—perfect consistency. Once we got seriously into election season, they decided they needed to change their methodology to something that would give a consistent read-out around a Goldilocks 212,000 jobs (not too hot to look like Biden was blowing up inflation, especially now that everyone knows it is rising again, and not so low as to look like we’d all be voting during a recession this year).

“Using the new seasonal adjustment factors, initial claims have been at a fairly consistent level since around mid-September 2023 and even more so since the start of February 2024,” the spokesperson said.

Nice how that worked out for you! I wonder why we needed new seasonal adjustment factors. Did seasons suddenly start working differently? Did we just figure out how they really do work, so we were wrong (as I suspected) for all past years? In which case, why would we trust you on anything?

Let me help: Maybe this is just the new reality of global warming. Now that the planet is consistently warming more and more each year as it is supposed to (thanks to shifting to new “heat” records, instead of raw “temperature” records), even when winters feel colder than ever and pile record snow into California and make Death Valley bloom more regularly, we can expect the lunatic weather to also regulate jobs more regularly. Because that makes sense.

It is like they don’t even bother to pretend to be real or logical in their reports anymore. Yet, CNBC seems to accept the government’s explanation as perfectly sufficient with no further questioning (because that would be investigative reporting), making me think they acknowledged the problem just so they could gloss over it for the public before anyone raised their own questions. It even closes the article with a video of Jim Cramer saying, “The jobs report is the single most important set of numbers for the stock market.”

Isn’t that convenient, too? The newly adjusted seasonal adjustments also work perfectly for the stock market that especially demands Goldilocks numbers that are neither too hot nor too cold so it can believe inflation is still coming down because the economy is cooling off, and we’ll have a soft recession-free landing because the economy is almost hot, but not too hot. What a perfect world!

Still, why would we expect people to even recognize a problem in this perfect consistency now that most of the population appears willing to believe a man can become a woman just because he declares he is, and almost everyone acts like that is perfectly normal, factual and logical? That avoids the whole problem of destructive reconstructive surgery. If he believes he is a woman, then she is right that she is. Ignore the truth of the chromosomes, the skeleton, the brain structure, the non-performing sexual organs that cannot transmit one’s own DNA into forming a new baby naturally.

The reason I exist

One of the reasons I write on this stuff is because I figure there HAVE to be other people out there who are questioning their own sanity and saying, “Why am I the only one seeing huge anomalies that don’t add up in these reports?” I write to explore why I’m seeing them because the cognitive dissonance in trying to believe them is painful, and I share what I discover to help others who think they must be going insane, recognize they’re fine. The rest of the world actually is crazy. The government, after all, thought that explanation above would satisfy people. It satisfied CNBC. It says, in effect, “We know there is no cooking of the books in the seasonally adjusted numbers because all the perfect evening out of the reported numbers is happening in the seasonal adjustments.” Uh, Ok.

So, YES, the extremely strong and resilient economy, which we know to be strong and resilient because “labor is tight” is an illusion. Labor is broken, as I’ve been saying for two years, and the numbers used to represent it as perfectly healthy are hopelessly and unfathomably rigged.

Thus, I’ve reported in the past the same machinations in raw job numbers where new jobs were deeply negative one December but raised by something like half a million to get a positive number due to that December having been “unseasonable cold,” and the VERY NEXT DECEMBER, the raw job numbers were, again, deeply negative by almost the same amount, and were raised by half a million to become nicely positive due to the month having been “unseasonably warm.” I noted at the time that there is apparently only one temperature at which jobs are ever normal for December. All other temperatures—higher or lower—require the same upward revisions.

Well, now CNBC has let the cat out of the bag, so people are finally going to get upset and take the government to task.

Not on your life! The same dull readers will barely notice what CNBC wrote, and it will pass out of the news cycle by tomorrow morning. I do my best to keep it in the cycle, but one little boy with a tin drum is hardly heard over the timpani drums of a passing orchestra. “Get outa here, Kid, you bother me.”

Stocks are getting adjusted, too, but not for the better

Meanwhile, in this perfect world, rising AI star Nvidia cratered 10% today, its worst day since the start of Covid, taking the Nasdaq down 2% for its sixth straight losing day—its longest streak in the wrong direction for over a year because that’s what happens when you’ve invested in denial for months on end with the government’s help and then reality starts cracking through. (Not that CNBC’s softball report about unemployment-claims manipulation had anything to do with it, but that a lot of things are breaking bad in the last couple of months—things that were already obviously bad and quivering with risks but are now showing up to such degree that its getting harder for the complicit media to keep covering up for it.)

The S&P also clinched six straight negative days, a feat it hasn’t accomplished since October, 2022, when stocks began their crash into a big bear market that lasted over a year. Netflix plunged 9%, too. AI-equipment maker, Super Micro Computer, Inc. plunged more than 23%. The market is perilously perched to fall as its fantasies get pulled away.

There was a lot of market talk about the manifold Middle East conflicts today, too, but especially the new Israel-Iran bust out. While Israel didn’t take out any nuke plants in its reprisal, according to the US and Iran, one wouldn’t expect they would do that by just blowing them up, as that could create Fukushimas all over the place that could send radiation clouds to Russia or China or other nations that might get really, really mad at Israel for irradiating them. So, that kind of operation is going to take procedural stealth like the Stuxnet virus and a lot of sophisticated caution to shut them down in ways that prevent meltdowns and restarts or massive distribution of nuclear clouds.

(There is much more on all of the above in the headlines that follow.)

---