Replies to post #47907 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[gloe]

agreed. anyone notice that the prior weeks claims were revised up to over 400k from under 400k? and remember how everyone went ga-ga over the number being below 400k? Totally bogus. People have been out of work so long they no longer qualify to file unemployment claims, so their numbers don't even show up.

People have been out of work so long that they are discouraged from looking anymore, so they are not counted in the unemployment figures either.

criminal game. will come home to roost at some point.

g

[Lane Hall-Witt]

mlsoft--

Yes! Of all the problems associated with the CNBC phenomenon -- covering the market minute by minute, digging for new stories every day -- the biggest in my mind is the fact that every economic report is treated as a market-moving drama. In the midst of all this spectacle, there's no time for reflection on the economic meaning of the numbers or on the many problems associated with the compilation of the statistics.

I read a couple of months ago that some financial firms were developing derivatives on certain economic data. I don't know how they were being structured, but it seemed to be along the lines of: if you're short the market, you might want to hedge with some exposure that'll make you money on a bullish jobs report -- so you buy an instrument with a strike on 400,000 initial claims or 385,000 initial claims or whatever. (No word on whether they'd be measured against the initial "pro-forma" report or the follow-on "GAAP" report!) Can you believe that? <LOL>