Although many economists have long suspected that the Biden administration was inflating the numbers, the official confirmation came later than expected due to “glitches” on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website.
The BLS had announced that they would be publishing their CES Preliminary Benchmark Announcement revision at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, but frustrated investors ended up having to refresh their browsers repeatedly as the government website, which presumably has some of the best IT minds in the country running it, repeatedly failed to update.
However, it turns out that a select few were able to get their hands on the data despite the technical problems. Complaints are rolling in about the fact that some Wall Street investment firms were given details about the report simply by calling into the BLS more than 15 minutes before they finally and very reluctantly posted it to the site.
According to Bloomberg, "at least three banks managed to obtain key payroll numbers Wednesday while the rest of Wall Street was kept waiting for a half-hour by a government delay that whipsawed markets and sowed confusion on trading desks."
This could have given these investors a nice head start, potentially profiting from the information before it became public knowledge. Many investors were waiting impatiently for the data as it was expected that this year’s revisions would be unusually large.
The bureau isn’t commenting on how some users got the information early or why the release was delayed, although it’s yet another embarrassment for the Biden administration considering the fact that the delayed information was a correction of information they released previously and botched – or, as many people believe, intentionally misrepresented in hopes of painting a more favorable picture of the economy ahead of the election.
It turns out that they made a downward revision of 818,000 jobs in the 12 months through March – that’s nearly a million jobs the Biden administration claimed were created that actually never existed.
This is the second largest annual overestimation of jobs numbers in the history of the U.S. and the biggest downward revision since 2009, raising a lot of questions and putting the Biden administration’s complete incompetency on full display yet again.
Multiple instances of selectively sharing crucial economic information
This wasn’t even the first time they let something like this happen. Earlier this year, a Labor Bureau employee actually sent information about housing inflation to a group of so-called “super users” made up of hedge funds. The issue was a hot topic among investors at the time, and the information had the potential to give them a sizeable advantage over their less-informed peers had it not turned out to be inaccurate in the end. Nevertheless, leaders of the agency admitted that sharing such information on a selective basis was inappropriate.
They also “inadvertently” posted eagerly awaited data about the Consumer Price Index in May well ahead of the official release time, which meant that the Wall Street firms that closely monitor such information may have caught it ahead of less sophisticated interested parties.
SMBC Nikko Securities Americas’ Senior U.S. Economist Troy Ludtka said: “To put it in the most generous terms: Government agencies absolutely cannot be selectively releasing critical, market-moving information to some agents and broker dealers first via telephone while keeping others in the dark. This is anathema to the very idea of a balanced market built on fair, accessible information.”
Of course, the Biden administration has already proven time and time again that it is not interested in fairness or truth, and this fiasco drives all those points home quite nicely.
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