by ZeroHedge News Staff at ZeroHedge
It’s delightfully fitting that on the day the entire financial world was holding its breath for Biden’s highly politicized and grossly incompetent Bureau of Labor Statistics to admit it had massively fucked up the jobs data over the past year, that Biden’s highly politicized and grossly incompetent Bureau of Labor Statistics fucked up even more.
At exactly 10am ET this morning, the BLS was supposed to publish its annual CES Preliminary Benchmark Announcement revision, an update on how many jobs in the past year were, for lack of a better word, made up (as we reported earlier, it just so happened that the number was 818,000, which was the second biggest annual overestimation of job creation in US history… something that surely was pure coincidence in an election year).
However, 10:01am ET hit… and nothing happened: millions of traders, thousands of economists and countless macrotourists were furiously slamming the F5 key, refreshing the revisions page to see…. nothing change. This went on, and on, and on…. and even though the market actually reacted as if data had been published, it turned out that algos were merely responding to phantom triggers in hopes of triggering momentum ignition up or down. No actual data was reported.
Market reacts to the BLS revision number which hasn't been published yet
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 21, 2024
As the desperate wait continued, and as seconds turned to minutes, we joked – nearly 30 minutes after the report was originally due – by publishing the phone number for the BLS department responsible for today’s report.
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 21, 2024
As it turns out, at least some people had more luck than us in reaching said department (we repeatedly got voicemail with the promise that someone would get back to us in 24-48 hours), because as Bloomberg reports, “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.”
That’s right: while the rest of the world was freaking out,…
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