Argentína: Vilja nota bandar. aðferðir til að "skilgreina" verðbólguna niður

http://www.nypost.com/seven/11062007/business/the_times_finally_gets_it___on_jobs_figu_44557.htm 

November 6, 2007 -- WHO says the U.S. doesn't export anything nowadays?

The government of Argentina, beset by criticism over rampant inflation, said it is considering using the American way of calculating rising prices.

The idea, of course, is to make inflation disappear statistically even while it's quite obvious in real life.

This is a real knee-slapper for those of us who follow this stuff for a living.

But it also gives me a quite serious segue into what I'd like to talk about today: why the U.S. financial markets are in such a delicate state these days.

Start with the subject of inflation.

As I mentioned in a column last Thursday, the way Washington calculates inflation allowed the Commerce Department to report that prices rose only 0.8 percent in the third quarter.

That is a quite tame inflation reading, even though commodities and other prices are telling a much different story.

The mild inflation number, in turn, permitted Washington to claim that the economy grew at a healthy annual rate of 3.9 percent in the quarter.

For each tick up in inflation the economy measured by the gross domestic product would have grown by that much less.

All that good economic news - dishonest as it is - was confirmed on Friday when the Labor Department reported that 166,000 new jobs were created in October.

That figure was about double the number Wall Street experts were expecting and far exceeded the 96,000 increase in the prior month.

But the jobs number isn't what it seems either.

As I mentioned last Thursday and have been bringing up for oh-so-many years, the October employment figure was juiced by an estimate for jobs the government believes - but can't prove - are being created by newly-formed companies that are not surveyed.

This time the guesstimate - officially called the birth/death model - accounted for around 103,000 of the 166,000 new October jobs.

(I'd like to take a little break here to bring out the trumpets - Toootoooto).

On Saturday, The New York Times - after missing the point for decades - finally ran a story headlined "Despite Gain In Job Data, Wall Street Is Skeptical.)