by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
Last Friday’s Non-Farm Payroll report came out with a massive 517,000 new jobs created in January. It blew expectations completely out of the water and forced onto global markets a different view of the US economy than the one it held just two days earlier when the FOMC announced another 0.25% hike to the Fed Funds rate.
Of course, this number was likely ‘goal-seeked’ as Zerohedge put it in their initial article. I don’t disagree with Zerohedge’s conclusion.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
In fact, it’s this idea of ‘goalseeking’ that I want to expound on. That observation is telling, not because there isn’t a nugget of truth in it, but because we are living in a world so awash in narratives supported by ‘data’ that it is a Herculean task to make any sense of what’s really going on.
That being said, if you look at the initial article from Investing.com they go over the other data released as well: hourly wages (beat expectations), hours worked (beat expectations and rising to 34.7 hours), and the overall U-3 Unemployment Rate falling to 3.4%, which is suspect due to new calculations and end of the year ‘book squaring’ of last year’s data.
The relentless criticism of the financial space, both normie and dissident, of the Federal Reserve here is the thing that is so noteworthy.
No matter what the Fed does it is and will be criticized.
The normie press want a return to the zero-bound to fund excessive leverage and the real wealth harvesting operation of the global oligarch class.
Y’all know who they are, The Davos Crowd.
“You Must Goalseek the Treasure“
The dissident press, centered around Zerohedge, wants to be proven right that they are good at Austrian economics, when they clearly aren’t. They are routinely frustrated that the world they have ‘goalseeked’ through the single-variable analysis of ‘the money supply’ keeps failing to materialize.
They can see bits and pieces of the moving picture and can easily identify the lies, statistical fudging, and desperate policies but they cannot ascribe any other motivation to them than incompetence.
I have come to the conclusion that this is the weakness of so many other commentators in this space. There is a stunning amount of hubris out there thanks to a lot of people having read a book by Rothbard or Mises and thinking they have the Rosetta Stone for global-macro economic analysis.
The problem with that is, as I routinely point out and emphasize, there is no ‘macro-economics.’ There is only a trillion little ‘micro-economic’ decisions taken by billions of people in real time that in a very rough sense create a more macro picture.
There is no ‘economy’ folks.
There is just you, me, and the 7+ billion other schleps on this planet trying to dodge bullets everyday. And in a world awash with this much leverage, credit money masquerading as real money, most of those bullets are coming from our own governments and those who hold their strings.
The fundamental fallacy to much of the analysis is that there are ‘free capital markets’ acting independently of the political milieu which circumscribe those ‘markets’ every day. This is one of my basic criticisms of both Bitcoin Maxis, who’ve never seen BTC operate outside the context of central banks intentionally debasing their own currencies, and Jeff Snider’s “Eurodollar” analysis which grew up in the context of a globalist putsch to use the dollar as a whip to punish the unwashed.
That would be you and me.
This isn’t to say in any way I’ve given up my fervent belief in the power of the individual to act according to their best interest and overcome/adapt to the diktats of the Wesley Mauchs of this world (Atlas Shrugged reference). Quite the opposite.
I’m more convinced than ever of this power. The problem is identifying what it looks like today when we project that power forcing a clash with the entrenched power structures and their likely range of decisions to counter our decisions.
Electrons Over Profits
This is the hard part. This is where people act like electrons; forever unwilling to be nailed down to a particular course of action. What do I mean by this? Remember, I’m very well versed in quantum mechanics and the lessons of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
The TL;DR for the layman is the following. In any system greater than a single hydrogen atom floating in a box (pretty much the entire Universe) knowing both the position (x) and the momentum (p) of any electron is unknowable precisely using vector-based math to solve for the forces acting on a multi-electron system.
