There was fleeting joy in Mudville Friday when the U.S. economy struck out, statistically speaking. Monthly payroll numbers came in weaker than “expected,” causing the kind of short-lived jubilation in the bond pits that we haven’t seen since…well, since last month’s “unexpectedly” weak statistics came out. As we know, nothing sends debt markets into an ecstatic tizzy like news that the economy’s intractable wallow has persisted for yet another month. And, get this, despite America’s anemic job growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was somehow able to report that unemployment had declined. Talk about letting us have it both ways! These guys do not merely cook the books, they marinate, baste and broil them. And then they serve them up with the chutzpah of a chef who has garnished roadkill with a lemon wedge and a sprig of parsley.

If you examine the chart below you’ll see that weaker-than-purportedly-expected employment numbers have become a fairly expectable feature of the monthly news cycle. In fact, the navel-gazing that these numbers have come to inspire has intensified to the point where payroll figures are no longer a mere preoccupation of investors but an obsession – one that invariably causes the world of punditry as well as the subterranean one of whisper numbers to get all lathered up as they try to second-guess the BLS. A futile exercise, to be sure, as witness Friday’s wild conniptions in both stock and bond markets.

(Click on chart to enlarge)

An Hour of Hysteria

Why sniffing out weakness in the economy should require guesswork is beyond me, since half the people I know are working twice as hard as they ever did just to pay their bills. Nevertheless, whisper numbers continue to circulate with the regularity of a cat’s bowel movements, causing just enough intestinal distress to set the markets a-gurgle. Thus, what might otherwise have been another dull and eventless day on the Street becomes a dull and eventless day alleviated by an hour of gratuitous hysteria. All of which has become entirely predictable if of no ultimate significance. And woe to the speculator who had advance knowledge on Thursday that payroll growth would come in at a paltry 110,000 jobs, the weakest performance since July. The poor guy undoubtedly would have loaded up on bond futures, only to see them crash and burn after rocketing for a few breathtaking minutes into the ionosphere.   

Such eventualities have begun to test our patience, even if we have come to expect this silly little ritual to repeat itself on the first Friday of each and every month. For me to have to ascribe meaning to it is like trying to write a sociological treatise on Regis and Kelly’s most recent show.