The [Recovery] Has No Clothes
Eric Sprott & David Baker
SilverSeek.com
March 29, 2012
What a difference a month makes. Now that Greece has been papered over, the bulls are back in full force, pumping up the equity markets and celebrating every passing data point with positive exuberance. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet, however. Very little has actually changed for the better, and it’s certainly too early to start cheerleading a new bull market.
Take the latest US unemployment numbers, for example. There was much excitement about the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report which announced that US unemployment remained unchanged at 8.3% during the month of February.2 The market was particularly enamored by the BLS’s insistence that non-farm payrolls increased by 227,000 during the month, as well as its upward revision of the December 2011 and January 2012 jobs numbers. Lost in all the excitement was the Gallup unemployment report released the day before, which had February unemployment increasing to 9.1% in February from 8.6% in January and 8.5% in December.3 Granted, the Gallup methodology is slightly different than that used by the BLS, but even if Gallup had applied the BLS’s seasonal adjustment, they would have still come out with an unemployment rate of 8.6%, which is considerably higher than that produced by the BLS.4 We all know which number the pundits chose to champion, but the Gallup data may have been closer to the truth.
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