Drudge Report from Friday

When I have a chance, I stop by the DrudgeReport just to see what the round up of news events. Imagine my surprise that Drudge on Friday was covering the (at this point) controversial Friday Non-Farms Payroll data from the BLS.

 I clicked the link thinking I'd be redirected to Bloomberg or CNBC, but instead to my surprise, it was straight to ZeroHedge, which was pretty quick to whip out a calculator and show us some basic math as to how the BLS arrived at Friday's blow-out and highly suspicious number, especially given the number of Wall Street lay-offs for the period and the number of temp jobs that were ended, which were not reported in the BLS data. Well after about 4 stories covering the BLS data and the evolution of understanding how they came to such a number, which had, as Biderman of TrimTabs pointed out (who tracks daily tax receipts and thus has a much better feel for what the true employment situation is like and uses to phony gimmicks) its beat rooted solely in a arbitrary 'seasonal adjustment' which was to say the least, shocking, ZeroHedge has put together their conclusions with all the math and data from the BLS so you can check and re-check it as many times as need be.

Once you realize how they fudged the number and apparently have been fudging the numbers for over a year, tracking Gallup's or other polling companies employment reports starts to look at lot more reliable and tells a FAR different story, but as for the great work ZeroHedge has done, not rooted in speculation, but hard facts, here is their conclusion on Friday's beat, which had it not been for the arbitrary and poorly understood seasonal adjustment, would have seen the NFP miss, just as the PMI data, ADP data and other employment data indexes have been clearly showing (employment on the decline).

You may ask, 'what does it matter?', well if the NFP was something you followed, then it would stand to reason you might want to know the truth. It also would stand to reason that Wall Street has done their own math and discounting the data is what they do, so Friday's beat may very well be discounted by Wall Street in the very near future. If nothing else, it may serve as a wake up call as to how corrupt and inept our system is, one which in this case, should not be biased in an election year, but seemingly is.

While I don't agree with everything ZH puts out (it's clear they are biased), it's hard to argue with the numbers.