FedUpUSA

Archive for February 21st, 2010

Paul Solman sits down with former bank regulator and author Bill Black as part of his continuing series of reports examining bank eform and the future of Wall Street.

CPI Number Reported INTENTIONALLY INCORRECT?

Posted by Karl Denninger

Remember the market’s “cheering” of the “-0.1%” CPI-U reading (core) yesterday?

There’s a problem – it was wrong.

Look at the highlighted numbers.  Let’s multiply them up.

(5.966 x 0) + (.769 x -2.1) + (25.206 x -0.1) + (.347 x 0.4) / 32.288 = -0.12%, or -0.1%.

But it was reported as -0.5% in the line directly above (inverted tone.)

Oops.

I didn’t re-run the weightings for the entire series but a quick “eyeball” of the table shows that this should result in a CORE reading of 0.1% (positive), not the negative number reported.

Will the BLS admit to this error?  Who the hell knows, but if you have a calculator, you can verify that yet another game to “boost” the market was run, with desire effect – a roughly 1/2% spike in the S&P 500 futures right on the BOGUS data release.

Since this table is undoubtedly computed (indeed, if I was to dump the raw data into EXCEL I could have a spreadsheet do this literally in a fraction of a second) it calls into question whether this was an accident or an intentional distortion of the data at the BLS.

It also leads to a few other questions, none of which are very comfortable to consider, but all of which, unfortunately and in light of this report, we must.

For example, is the BLS simply publishing whatever the government wants it to, and then making up the numbers inside the report to hit that target?  Even a simple high-school cheat knows that you must “fix” the constituent numbers that go into a cheated result in order to not get (easily) caught; in a world where people don’t add things with calculators but instead have computers sum up columns and do the math it is essentially impossible that this sort of ”mistake” is an error. 

Rather, it is virtually certain that this “reported” value was in fact intentionally false, and the persons doing so were too clumsy to “fix” the evidence behind it so that it would “add up.”

We now officially live in a world where intentionally-incorrect data is published by our government for the specific intention of misleading the markets.

PS: This will, of course, be used to screw Social Security recipients out of their lawfully-mandated cost-of-living increases.  Count on that.  Oh, and don’t ask about the money you already got screwed out of from other similar “errors” that neither I or anyone else caught because they weren’t so clumsy as to fail to cover it up.