President Donald Trump on Friday called for the firing of the head of the agency that produces the monthly jobs figures after a report showed hiring slowed in July and was much weaker in May and June than previously reported.
Trump in a post on his social media platform alleged that the figures were manipulated for political reasons and said that Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, should be fired.
Trump focused much of his ire on the revisions the agency made to previous hiring data. Job gains in May were revised down to just 19,000 from 125,000, and in June they were cut to 14,000 from 147,000. In July, only 73,000 positions were added. The unemployment rate ticked up to a still-low 4.2% from 4.1%.
While the jobs numbers are often the subject of political spin, economists and Wall Street investors — with millions of dollars at stake — have always accepted U.S. government economic data as free from political manipulation.
So is the official policy going forward to lie about the economy?
Is there going to be any backlash against this?
So is the official policy going forward to lie
about the economy?Fair enough.
Some pennies are going to be upset, but most of the money will be fine.
Wouldn’t that make the jobs data even worse?
It would but Trump right now is Erdogan-lite when it comes to control over all the different government departments and agencies and putting out bad data to try to make their policies not look so terrible in practice.
Why this will ultimately fail. There are many huge financial corporations in the world where a major part of their ability to be successful is having accurate data. More accurate data than their competitors so they employ their own data collection and analysis teams and don’t fully rely on governments and other corporations to be truthful
Then companies that want investment/loans go to these big finance/banking companies and these finance companies have their own data on companies that want a loan or they’ll require these potential debtors provide a look into their books and the bank will want accurate data.
If the potential debtors gives bad data, are all the retailers, shipping companies, packaging companies, etc all providing bad data. If the states labor department is underreporting unemployment, are the public benefits departments reporting bad data? How about independent non-profit food banks and other community organizations.
Every countries government in the world would want accurate data from countries and companies around the world too so they can develop policy with good data in mind with a mind for how global trade activity may be heading towards
Trying to lie about finance and labor statistics at the major corporation and national government level in the modern world is stupid
I appreciate the thoughtful analysis, but I was just making a dumb joke that firing two people would make unemployment worse, not better, because there are two more unemployed people…
And if the president is openly manipulating the data everyone who needs that data to be right will avoid government data.
Well it’s certainly unlikely to continue to be free from bias.
I didn’t even need a report. I was assuming, from the fact that LinkedIn stopped sending me suggestions of jobs to apply for, and now sends notifications of jobs that were filled, that I guess I missed out on (?🤷♂️). I can’t explain the logic behind their decision to do this, but I assumed it had something to do with a scarcity of open job opportunities.
Firing the guy handing you the data isn’t gonna make the data suddenly different, Dumbass Donald.
THE FIRINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL EMPLOYMENT NUMBERS IMPROVE! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
This is they guy who wanted to make covid numbers better by stopping testing, and he has only grown more senile since then…
Now, if employment does a 180 in August, he’s going to have a real hard time selling it. What an incompetent loon.
I remember when BLS way overshot ADP numbers (that showed her loss) and thought it was weird at the time. Guess ADP was closer to right
