Tag Archives: Beverly Perdue

Today’s Economic News

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Things that make you go hmmm: Today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics weekly jobless claims number was apparently released 15 minutes before the 7:30 CST a.m. announcement.

Bloomberg reported:

“Jobless claims data were available on Labor Dept. website about 15 minutes before scheduled 8:30am release today, Stone & McCarthy Research Associates economic analyst Terry Sheehan says.” Now aside from the fact that SMRA should be commended for chacking the DOL.gov website early and getting a critical advance look at today’s most important data point, we have some questions:
Who broke the embargo and why?
Who else had even earlier advance access to the data?
Why did the BLS have this glitch?
And most importantly, especially in light of the recent scandal about the BLS leaking data selectively early, just how is the BLS policing itself from such erroneous data releases, and if the answer is non-existant, can the BLS announce whether it has preferential “huddle” agreements with anyone when it comes to leaking data as it did today?”

Good questions. Remember it was discovered the Democrat governor of North Carolina, Beverly Perdue, was getting advanced notice of the monthly numbers, which is against all rules? Now here’s another instance. Hmm.

Incidentally, the jobless claims dropped 6,000 to 361,000. But before you start popping champagne, ZeroHedge alerts us to other data:

As we noted last night, inventory destocking is the great unknown as far as consensus expectations and the wholesale inventories data this morning just confirmed that this is a worrying trend. With the first drop MoM since September 2011 and dramatically missing expectations, inventories dropped 0.2% and perhaps more worryingly – given the drop in inventories – is the critical inventory-to-sales ratio has now risen two months in a row as clearly sales are dropping faster than companies were expecting.

Then, he quotes:

Bloomberg’s Consumer Comfort index slipped back below -40 this week (despite all the market ebullience) indicating empirically at least a period of severe economic discontent among the most critical segment of our economy. Worst still, the outlook for the economy is its weakest in six months and the last two months have seen confidence on the economy plunge its fastest in 13 months.

Loose Lips and Economic Dips

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Is someone finding out the monthly Unemployment number before it is announced? Skeptics among us have thought yes. Today, Michael Barone confirms it.

Barone cites the Carolina Journal which has some eye popping information. It “reports that staffers in North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue’s office have been getting advance word on monthly unemployment statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is highly illegal under federal laws and violates what I have understood to be a strong tradition in the BLS and other government statistics that no one – no one at all, not even in the White House – gets advanced word ahead of the public announcement of government statistics,” he says.

The rationale for the secrecy is to stop any collusion between people that would give someone an advantage in the markets. Integrity in government agencies is another. We expect them to be free of political influence. Obviously they are not.

In Perdue’s case these leaks gave her people a heads up so that they would be ready with their talking points when the data is released and help her look better. Evidently someone was doing it for her previous and fellow Democrat governor, Mike Easley, in ’03 and ’04, according to Barone’s sources.

Perhaps that’s another reason why the American people no longer are believing what the government (and the media) put out as fact. The vital component of trust has been lost. This is something the House Education and the Workforce Committee needs to look into.

Lately it seems that the eruptions of corruption are coming so fast it’s hard to keep up with them. Solyndra, MF Global, Fast and Furious, the Black Panther voter fraud, Light Squared, the stimulus package; almost daily something spills out. That makes it harder for the public to keep up with them all, which may be what they are hoping.

It is interesting that this case involves North Carolina because that is where the DNC will have its 2012 convention. Maybe they are trying to protect themselves by cheating like this; if these scandals become more widely known they may deeply regret their convention state choice.