Plunge In Jobless Claims Exposes Apolitical Fed-Cut ‘Policy Error’ Further

The day after The Fed slashes rates by a crisis-like 50bps, jobless claims data plunges to multi-month lows signaling an economy that is anything but ‘soft landing’ let alone landing at all…

Adjusted initial claims tumbled from 231k to 219k (lowest since May) while unadjusted claims continued to tumble to 12-month lows…

Source: Bloomberg

Continuing claims also continued its (economically positive) downtrend, sliding from 1.843mm to 1.829mm Americans…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, wtf is going on here…

Source: Bloomberg

While the official unemployment rate dipped modestly from three-year highs, jobless claims have crashed to near record lows.

Does that really look like an economy that needs a 50bps rate-cut?

As one market veteran pointed out to us this morning, “either The Fed is a bunch of idiots, or this data is total bullshit.” Fact of the matter is, Powell even admitted – after bringing up the massive revision to the payrolls data – that it is more likely the latter (bullshit data) than the former (idiots); though we suspect it’s a bit of both (blending with some political pressure).