If you repeat a lie often enough, and if you only speak with confidence and in a calm, cool collected voice, the people will believed you – propaganda 101. Also, if you repeat enough times that the US economy – that $17 trillion juggernaut 0 which as recently as December was fabled to have entered the escape velocity phase and thus was safe from the adverse side effects of the Fed’s taper, has hit a brick wall because of snow in the winter, then maybe the people will believe that too. Of course, there are the facts, and as always happens, the facts are diametrically opposed to the propaganda.
Presenting Exhibit A: a scatterplot chart showing the December-February nonfarm payroll growth vs the snow extent anomaly over the same period collated from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab. The correlation between the two data sets… drumroll: -10%. In fact, over the entire historical record, there are only three instances when heavy snow coincided with job losses, less than when there was light snowfall. In other words, there is virtually no correlation between the amount of heavy snowfall and concurrent jobs gains, and in reality, there is a modest inverse correlation.
So perhaps next year, when strong jobs report coincide with heavy snowfall, the propaganda will at least have modest empirical evidence on its side.
Alas, for now, the propaganda is just that…
Source: @not_jim_cramer
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1avcdoN Tyler Durden