President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

On U.S. macro data? The person who does those posts is consistently spot on.

This isn't opinion. Either what is in that post is factually correct, or it isn't. Have at it.

I can tell you that most of what they do along those lines is pretty accurate. I go through the BLS surveys myself (I haven't yet from this morning, I am knee-deep in things today) because it's become entertaining to see just how big a distortion of reality each month now brings, and HOW they do it. If what they said is true, I can guarantee that you will be calling a lot of other people who have nothing to do wiht them whack jobs, too.

The BLS knows it can do whatever it wants and all mainstream news sites are going to do is parrot the headline number they throw out there. Anyone who does a dive into what they are doing is going to get dismissed as a "whack job." It's wash, rinse, pravda, at this point.

 

Translating what it said into something more anecdotal, but concrete, this was a story from the WaPo a few weeks ago:



The BLS might be taking a surge in people like that and counting all of their side hustles as "new jobs."

How much of a factor that would be in a blow-out report that beat estimates by a lot? I have no idea. I can try to glean what I can from the household survey data when I have the chance, but I am not sure what it will net.

Having seen a lot of amazing things in those BLS reports over the last 10 years or so, I wouldn't be surprised if they did do that on a large scale. If that is the case, whether they are clueless or dishonest. ... well, I have my suspicions.

 

Another thing from today (that 99.9 percent of the world doesn't pay attention to). The U.S. economy that has supposedly been steaming toward full employment. ... has incomprehensibly given us record mortgage, auto loan, student loan and credit card debt (up significantly somehow while millions of jobs have been being created).

Household Debt and Credit Report - FEDERAL RESERVE BANK of NEW YORK
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data/pdf/HHDC_2022Q2

Of course that is actual data, not "adjusted" data.