Okay, I confess, one of my guilty pleasures in the early morning is to turn over to CNBC when they have their countdown clock (which includes showing the time in hundreths of seconds - talk about breathless) signalling the time (usually 8:30 am EST) when some significant piece of economic data will be released.
They gather round the table and chatter excitedly - they invite in lots of peoples who all speak in econobabble - e.g.: "dollar depreciation is affecting the yield curves against the expectations that Chinese reserves will reflect trade imbalances dependent on petro vs. Euro pegged instrument derivatives...."
But this morning - well - follow below and maybe somebody can translate for me - because there is an unexplained mystery that seems -- to my poor brain - of some moment.
All the cuties and sages were discussing the upcoming "jobs" report. The "consensu" was that the Labor Department would report a loss of 525000 jobs (an improvement!) which would cause the unemployment rate to spike to 9.2%
The numbers came in - joyous was the news - only 345000 jobs lost. Eureka, less than expectations, well below consensus, yield curves bouncing - why, it is a veritable torrent of good news.
But wait - the unemployment rate went to 9.4% - the highest in nearly 30 years.
So - if anybody can translate - how did the nearly 200000 fewer lost jobs cause the rate to turn up so dramatically?
Seems to me that what happened was that so many got so discouraged they dropped out of "looking for work" [thus not technically unemployed] which shrunk the pie from which the percentage is taken so that the rate went way up, relatively speaking.
Anyway - if someone has the decoder talisman - I would be interested to know the official explanation.