Daily Market Notes
We Stopped Counting Consensus Values at Five. There Were Seven. The Print Was Below All of Them.
September payrolls printed 29,000. The seven consensus values this desk collected ran from 84,000 to 100,000, so every one of them was too high — the closest, a named bank's 60,000, by 31,000. The miss against the 27-analyst median was 61,000, which is 0.68 times the mean absolute error we published for this release a week ago. Two harder findings: the Bureau's own trailing twelve-month average moved from 31,000 to 45,000 between consecutive releases, so the denominator in our 2.9-times-trend claim was not a fact; and the 4.2 per cent unemployment figure we read and declined to publish, under a rule we wrote the same morning, was the one that printed. July now has three vintages and has changed sign twice.