Non-Farm Payroll Fairy Tales

The TrimTabs employment analysis, which uses real-time daily income tax deposits from all U.S. taxpayers to compute employment growth, estimated that the U.S. economy shed 255,000 jobs in November.  This is in extreme contrast with the Government's Bureau of Labor Statistics report which showed a loss of only 11,000 jobs in November.  Here's the article link from Clusterstock.com:  BLS is full of BS

ADP, the global business outsourcing firm which, among other functions, provides payroll services to 400,000 U.S. companies representing 24 million employees, had estimated on Wednesday that 169,000 jobs were lost in November.

I would suggest that, given what we know about the manipulation of Government statistics, that the TrimTabs and ADP estimates of the employment situation are much more reliable than the Government estimates.  TrimTabs and ADP make a living selling accurate, unbiased economic data to the investment management industry.  If their data sucks they don't get paid.  The Obama administration, on the other hand - especially at this point in time - is completely incentivized to produce a fairy tale which shows that the employment situation is improving.

Make no mistake about it, as a professional speculator I would bet a lot of money on the relative accuracy of the TrimTabs/ADP reports over the Goverment report.  Apparently the stock market agrees with my assessment of the situation.  After the initial knee-jerk, idiot-driven spike in the Dow after the market opened, the Dow ended up closing 121 points, or 1.2%, below its initial high of the day.  At one point the Dow was quite negative for the day.

Here's a modest proposal for Obama to reduce the unemployment rate:  why not just stop extending unemployment benefits?  That way, as people fall off the unemployment payroll and stop looking for jobs that don't exist (except in the fantasies of the Government authors of the birth-death model fairy tale), they officially drop out of the labor force headcount and will thereby reduce the computed rate of unemployment.

**NOTE: this is John Williams' (author of http://www.shadowstats.com/) assessment of the Government's employment calculations:  

Just in time to boost the confidence of Holiday Season shoppers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced a 0.2% downturn in the November Unemployment rate, with November payroll employment virtually unchanged. Those results are nonsense, if taken literally...There are serious flaws evident in the payroll employment survey, ranging from the inability of the birth-death model to handle a recession, to the use of a concurrent seasonal factor adjustment, which allows outright gaming of the numbers, should someone choose to do so. The short-term reporting of payroll data is misleading — virtually worthless — at the moment.