If Bernie Madoff taught us anything it's that every successful ponzi scheme requires precisely one critical component to keep it afloat: a steady stream of fresh capital to fund redemptions. Absent that key component, even the most carefully crafted ponzi, with the best, most creative accounting fabrications in the world, will inevitably fail from a lack of real, cold, hard cash to keep the illusion going.
The September jobs report was a bizarre exercise in "goalseeked" data: from the first drop in Establishment Survey payrolls in 7 years, to the near record monthly surge in full-time jobs and Household Survey employment, to the erroneous calculation in average hourly earnings, virtually everything about the latest payrolls report was off.
Still, accurate or fabricated, here is the breakdown of the seasonally-adjusted job gains and losses that took place in the hurricane-impacted month.
Having pointed out a glaring error in today's payrolls report, which indicated that there was at least one math error in calculating the average hourly earnings number, and as a result casts doubt on every other piece of data released by the BLS, we urge algos and the handful of carbon-based traders, to take anything released by the BLS with a boulder of salt, especially data on wage inflation, until the BLS provides an explanation for what is going on.
As noted earlier, Wall Street was completely clueless ahead of today's payroll, with most expecting a small positive print but two brave forecasters went so far as to predict that the recent hurricanes would result in a negative print, and sure enough, moments ago the BLS reported that in September, the US economy lost 33,000 hurricane distorted jobs, the first payrolls decline since September 2010.
Tomorrow's hurricane-affected September jobs report will be... confusing. That is the (lack of) consensus from Wall Street analysts, who expect an average print of 80,000 (down from the 3-month average of 185K), however with huge variance on either side, with 4 economists predicting a loss of jobs, three expecting a print higher than 150K and one optimistic forecaster going as high as 260,000.
The amusing breakdown by bank is as follows: