'Boom' - Wages Rebound and Past Months Show 'massive' revision | Marketwatch

[Fred Sanders]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/boom-wages-rebound-and-past-months-show-massive-revision-2015-02-06?dist=lcountdown


“The 257K gain in payrolls was some 30K above the consensus forecast, and was accompanied by a massive cumulative 147K upward revision to the prior two months. Crucially for Fed policy, wages rebounded following the surprisingly weak figures in the prior month.” — Andrew Grantham, CIBC World Markets.

“Given the strong employment growth, the uptick in the unemployment rate is mostly noise in the data, which will be followed by rapid declines in the months ahead. The recovery in the average hourly earnings in January aligns it better with the Employment Cost Index, released last week, which shows modest acceleration in wages. As the labor market continues to tighten, we expect to see acceleration in wage growth in 2015.” — Gad Lavenon, The Conference Board

“The job market data leave the door wide open for a first hike in interest rates in the summer. However, the FOMC are not due to consider policy until their next meeting on March 17-18, and much might happen before then.” — Chris Williamson, Markit

“These are very good numbers. The pattern seems to be that everything tends to get revised up. This is extraordinary in many ways and another signal that the economy is actually functioning in a fairly normal fashion, and I think that’s an important message to get across and we stop thinking about our economy as something in some kind of perpetual crisis” — Charles Plosser, president of the Philadelphia Fed, on CNBC

“Employment growth is astonishingly strong; it will have consequences for the Fed,” — Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics

.................

Cue the Math Deniers.

[zipplewrath]

1. Obama vs. Bush

I've noticed over the years that Bush's economic numbers often got revised/corrected/updated and they got worse. Obama has suffered from initial numbers that were "worse" and then upon revision got better, occasionally significantly better. I'm presuming that the bureaucracy prevents this from being "intentional" but at the very least it would seem to expose a "lag bias" where they tend to report data with smaller changes during times of large variations, thereby missing big shifts.