We always knew that the sleazeballs who dish up those surreal U.S. payroll figures each month are the kind of guys we wouldn’t trust alone with a housepet. In case you were wondering how, exactly, they doctor the data, here’s an interesting tidbit from Harry Dent’s May latest newsletter: “But then April job creation came in at a better than expected 244,000 suggesting the economy still has rising momentum despite high oil and food prices. The problem with the job creation number is that a full 175,000 of those 244,000 jobs were part of the governmental birth/death adjustment. This adjustment tries to account for the companies that ‘die’ and do not return their employment survey. The way the adjustment is made is to assume that all the employees of defunct companies immediately found jobs elsewhere in small companies, or started their own. How likely is that?“
