White House Warns Latest Jobs Data Will Be Ugly Due to Omicron (As Atlanta Fed GDPNow Forecast Falls To 0.1%)

Confounded Interest ^ | 02/01.2022 | Anthony B. Sanders

[Browns Ultra Fan]

Biden spokesperson Jen “The Ginger Goebbels” Paski and the White House always have an excuse for bad news. Perhaps they watched John Belushi in “The Blues Brothers” for help with “It wasn’t my fault!” excuses.

(Bloomberg) — The White House is lowering expectations for this week’s U.S. jobs report, saying that brief absences of workers due to omicron could overstate the number of unemployed people for last month.

Several White House officials have teed up Friday’s report with warnings, saying that the week when surveys were taken for the January payroll numbers was the height of illness absences in the aftermath of the holidays.

If a worker was out “and did not receive paid leave, they are counted as having lost their job,” Psaki said Monday. Nearly 9 million people missed work due to illness in January, when the data were being collected, she said.

“So we just wanted to kind of prepare, you know, people to understand how the data is taken,” she said. “As a result, the month’s jobs report may show job losses in large part because workers were out sick from omicron.”

Economists expect nonfarm payrolls to rise by 150,000 for January — the weakest reading since the end of 2020. The U.S. unemployment rate is seen remaining unchanged, at 3.9%, according to the median estimate of forecasts compiled by Bloomberg.

So, are Dreese and Psaki saying that US GDP will roar back … from 0.1% … if Omicron fades away? And that all the fiscal and monetary stimulypto are going to cease creating problems??

Despite the fear of Omicron in the upcoming jobs report, there are still 5 rate hikes on the horizon to combat inflation … created by the Biden Administration and Federal Reserve as they combated COVID with massive fiscal and monetary stimulus.

[Browns Ultra Fan]

Nothing is ever Biden's fault and the MSM agree. Too bad it IS his fault.

[pnut22]

Taking unpaid time off counts as losing your job?

[cranked]

3 more years of good stuff......
Woohooo!

/s

[Magnum44]

[EQAndyBuzz]

I’m still recovering from Moronic. It’s been almost four weeks and I feel like I am in a perpetual state of slugishness. This is everyone’s fault. If doctors spent more time trying to do no harm instead of playing politics, maybe this could have been figured out.

[TonyinLA]

A week sick leave = unemployed in democrat la-la land.
Don’t remember quitting or being fired, ever, from any job bc I missed work due to the flu/cold.
Just more nonsensical bullsh*t reported as “news” to deflect from dem disasters. But their low-IQ voters will eat it up.

[TonyinLA]

It’s illegal to fire someone bc of COVID in CA.
Almost certainly the same across USA, esp’ly in the high-density, low-IQ commie compounds.
Not that actual facts mean anything to the commie.

[Myrddin]

I’m a week into it. Some tinnitus and slight fog remain. I haven’t missed a day
of work. Home office productivity. It worked great for 3 weeks of chickenpox too.

[Bratch]

Sketchy Economic Data About to Surface, White House Proactively Seeds MSM Narrative

January 31, 2022 | Sundance | 253 Comments

For those who have been following closely, the economic data releases over the past several months have been almost impossible to reconcile from a Main Street perspective.  Additionally, the scale of inflation is skewing everything that stems from dollar valuation.

CTH is certain the fourth quarter GDP statistic (+6.9%) is useless and was an outcome of several flawed metrics:

(1) the import data was misrepresented and not accurately deducted (supply chain issue);

(2) the value of building inventories was over calculated as an outcome of inflation; and

(3) the value of all economic activity was subsequently skewed because the economic outputs (goods and services) were recorded at higher prices.

It has been our estimation that Main Street economic activity was substantially less than the data discussed by financial pundits.

Our review also sees the employment situation on Main Street as considerably less optimistic than claimed.  Bolstering that point, in a very weird and structured preview from the White House, spokesperson Jen Psaki made an odd statement today.  

WATCH (14:35 prompted):

01/31/22: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki

Psaki is prepositioning a narrative that employment data in January will be lower than expectations, perhaps considerably lower, as a result of “workers calling out sick” from COVID, ie. the omicron variant, during the time when employment polling was conducted.  That is a very unusual proactive narrative.

Those talking points would not get into the briefing material if there wasn’t a person highly concerned in the economic circle to put them there.  Quite frankly, this is a talking point the White House spokesperson would never have in their briefing book if there wasn’t an advanced notification of their need for it.

Someone knows something.

Given the nature of how heavily manipulated the government institutions are, there’s a strong likelihood the Bureau of Labor and Statistics have been surprised by their employment polling results.  That internal tremor, a concern amid the political tribe, is then conveyed to someone, who then relays the warning to the White House economic team…. and that’s how Psaki gets the briefing material.

In the background of this unusually proactive economic and employment notation, the Atlanta FED recently released their forward-looking estimation [DATA HERE] of the first quarter GDP.  Keeping in mind the official 4th quarter result was +6.9%, the Atlanta Fed is saying the first quarter of 2022 looks like 0.1%.

[DATA SOURCE - Graphic Source]

The economy of the United States doesn’t go, heck, cannot go, from 7% to ZERO in one quarter without some massive dynamic, like closing down the economy…..

Unless….

Unless, the 6.9% was manufactured horsepucky from the outset.

The economy doesn’t go from 6.9% growth in December to ZERO growth a few days later without something substantive happening in the background.  My guess is the inventory buildup, cited by the Bureau of Economic Analysis in December, was the result of a massive drop in demand that took place in the three previous months.

The inventory and inflation driven inventory evaluation that helped inflate the metric of the Gross Domestic Product, was not the result of the supply chain coming back to normal.  I will bet a donut the inventory buildup was specifically because demand collapsed.

My view of that situation is supported by the historic drop in productivity that was noted in the last half of 2021.  The federal spending, and the federal subsidies for businesses and corporations to retain employees, ran past the period where payrolls would have naturally contracted due to the drop in demand.

If I am correct, the employment situation was artificially influenced, because interventionist COVID spending/bailouts allowed payrolls to be covered, and employees to remain on the payroll register, during a time when they should have been dropped if natural sales/profits were responsible for filling the payroll accounts of companies.  This would explain the macro drop in productivity while macro employment was retained.

The natural outcome of that viewpoint is….  When the federal deposits into the private sector payroll accounts dry up, employers eventually drop employees.

That rather dramatic scenario is enough to trigger the BLS to freak out when they did the payroll polling.

Just a hunch…  We’ll find out on Friday.

[EQAndyBuzz]

“I’m a week into it. Some tinnitus and slight fog remain.”

The fog is the worst and after that is reading. I’m finding a regimen of 3 tylenol and three advil every 6 hours keeps the headache away. Trying to stay up a little later at night so I can get a solid 7-8 hours of sleep. With the exception of my first quarantine in SC 3 weeks ago, I’ve been working. Also a home office person.

[Chode]

[Hojczyk]

Covid is to blame for everything

[Billthedrill]

Yeah, it was CoVid. Also the Russians, Donald Trump, and white supremacists. Don’t even start me on unicorns and the Tooth Fairy.

[Chode]

100%

[House Atreides]

“…The economy doesn’t go from 6.9% growth in December to ZERO growth a few days later without something substantive happening in the background. My guess is the inventory buildup, cited by the Bureau of Economic Analysis in December, was the result of a massive drop in demand that took place in the three previous months…”
******************************************************************

Correctamundo! There’s no way in hell the supposed inventory buildup could have been caused by new product entering inventory… IN THE MIDST OF THE MASSIVE SUPPLY CHAIN PROBLEMS.

[griswold3]

If you refuse the vaccine, it means you voluntarily quit your job.

[Kharis13]

This can’t be! Joe had a plan to shut down the virus!

[Myrddin]

I'm up at 7 AM and at my desk by 8 AM. Typically work until midnight with a break for dinner with my wife when possible. Still putting in 55+ hours a week and delivering on my elements of the project. Lots of SME oriented items since I've been part of the development team for many of the component systems over the last 30 years. Tailoring over the hill OSGi stuff running in Felix to host a modern Spring Boot API and getting it to run in a Docker container was one of the tasks. The last couple weeks was converting user account records from another system presented as XML and outputting LDAP LDIF records and keycloak JSON/shell to bulk convert the users to the new environment.

I have a 500 g bag of L-serine arriving tomorrow to pair with my flush niacin. It is used as part of Dmitry Kats most recent protocol.

I've been using the melatonin/curcumin/niacin approach of late, so I don't know if the L-serine/niacin is going to work better for me.

Hope you get to feeling better soon. I hope the image renders correctly above.

[grey_whiskers]

Thanks for posting this on serine, I’ll read it in a day or two.

FReegards!

[Myrddin]

My L-serine arrived via UPS this afternoon. I tried out 4 g L-serine with 500 mg flush niacin. A few tingles from the niacin as usual, but I also got sleepy. That may be a consequence of only having 4 1/2 hours sleep last night. On an unrelated note, the same UPS delivery had the package from Amazon with 4 rapid COVID-19 tests. My wife and I did them in the kitchen...negative for both. We're done with that part of the rodeo.