President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Once again, the moron-in-chief defies conventional norms in a way that he thinks benefits himself. ... but skirts around the edges of the law.

This morning:



There is supposed to be an embargo on the number, for the reason that if you have advance knowledge, you can trade it. Markets react to those numbers, because it supposedly gives a hint about what the Federal Reserve may do.

After the tweet, presupposing a "good" number, yields were at session highs and the dollar surged a little.

The president is supposed to be given those numbers in advance. The Council of Economic advisors gets the numbers the day before.

This is the directive from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs regarding their advance knowledge of the number: "employees of the Executive Branch shall not comment publicly on the data until at least one hour after the official release time."

There is a good reason for this. ... not that it has ever stopped cronyism within the BLS from giving the numbers in advance to trading desks who then profit off of it. But the president? I can't stand this guy.

BTW. ... for anyone wondering how we can be beyond full employment, but still adding jobs. ... the labor force participation rate dropped. There are tens of millions of working age Americans who don't work, who simply don't get counted in this game of Kabuki Theater. We can get the unemployment rate to a negative number, the way they "count" it.

 

Don't get me going. This was actually a really good report. ... Not the BS that sometimes gets passed off as good. The last 6 or 7 years we have added a boatload of part time waiter and retail jobs. ... to replace what were once full-time better paying manufacturing jobs. This report was broad based. For example, there were a lot of construction jobs (better paying), during a month in which the weather wasn't even particularly conducive to it.

But markets are very algorithmic today. It's not the numbers, per se, it is reading tea leaves. EVERYTHING -- from the currency to the debt to the equity markets -- has been destroyed. There is no honest price discovery left. All that matters are the carry trades, and that all follows from how much the various central banks around the world are creating debt (and margin / leverage). It's been stunning over the last decade.

As long as it continues, the "risk on" trades continue. But there is constant fear that they are either going to back off, or we are going to see a credit crisis due to what they have created. So the tea leave readers use these numbers to try to guess what the central banks (in this case, the Federal Reserve) is going to do. They are actually not focused on the actual jobs numbers anymore. It's accepted that it is a nonsensical number. Now it is the wage growth number, in this misguided belief that the Federal Reserve is going to put on the brakes if "inflation" (as the term gets misused) takes off. When in reality, the inflation is all around us, because of how much they have increased M2 money supply over the last decade and how much it has driven up asset prices artificially, setting up their next mess. In any case, the Fed Funds futures move on the numbers, as people reprice the odds of rate hikes, and that spills over into the currencies and debt markets.

As for the report itself. ... their numbers (speaking generally) are unadulterated bullshit. And trust me, I have looked at this in a way most people wouldn't have the patience to. To give one egregious example, let's say you are someone who had a manufacturing job 15 years ago, then the financial crisis hit, and they lost their job. ... And today, they are hustling 3 side jobs struggling to get by, and earning less (as your debt has increased, thanks to the actual inflation the Fed has created). The BLS actually counts all three jobs and then some politician then claims, "I created 2 new jobs!" And all that, while tens of millions of working age people have just given up and collect a variety of government benefits to subsist.

 

That was the exact conversation I had with someone at about 8 a.m. this morning. It's common sense. When he doesn't tweet next month, we know a 25,000 print is coming.