In this story at the New York Post, economic/financial market skeptic John Crudele suggests that you lower your expectations for tomorrow's labor report for the following reasons:
As I've reported before, the 2.689 million job loss turned into a gain of 243,000 only because Labor's seasonal adjustment programs expected the job losses to be bigger. The warm winter weather probably kept some people from being put out of work, and this threw off Washington's calculations.
Will that same thing happen with tomorrow's number?
That isn't likely. Yes, the weather has remained warm. But Labor's computers are expecting undoctored, not seasonally adjusted growth of more than 800,000 jobs in February.
So there's less chance that the seasonal adjustments will be pleasantly surprising.
And February isn't one of those months in which Washington includes a huge guesstimate for jobs added by companies it thinks, but can't prove, were just started. This so-called Birth/Death Model has been the biggest contributor to job growth — bogus job growth — over the past few years.
Also, John has spotted a link between Tuesday's stock market dive and Wednesday's story about the Fed's latest thinking on the next round of money printing:
Even though one Fed official last week told investors to stop depending on "morphine" from the central bank, the cry for another version of quantitative easing went out less than 24 hours after the Dow Jones industrial average fell 203 points on Tuesday.
Why not give Wall Street what it wants?
Because the Fed's money-printing operation is leading to higher commodities prices. And as thrilled as I would be to bail Wall Street out again, can't we at least wait until it really needs our help?
That's a good question (the second one, that is).