Did Obama Warn on Friday’s Unemployment Data?

There have been at least two occasions where President Obama referred to the direction of the unemployment and non-farm payrolls data before the key report due Friday.  Once was just a month ago, but it seems that the third telegraph was just made today.

A personal perspective here today is that President Obama was still more cautious and in evaluating his comments today. For a reading on tomorrow’s unemployment it seems a negative bias with a probably higher official unemployment rate.  That being said and making odds, it seems that Obama’s tone and speech was leaning toward the data continuing to get worse from what we saw a month ago on the official unemployment rate.  As far as on the non-Farm Payrolls data, that would be a total wild card.

Our latest read from Bloomberg puts unemployment at an expected 10.2% for the month of November, which would be flat compared to the 10.2% rate in October.  Ditto from Dow Jones as a consensus.  That, of course, is the official rate, as most guess that the unofficial unemployment is above 17%.

Getting a read on a presidential speech on jobs created via non-Farm Payrolls or jobs lost is more difficult.  That is definitely the case when you consider that there is not even a year’s worth of trying to read expressions, hints, and body language.  Bloomberg has a consensus estimate that the change in non-Farm Payrolls fell by 100,000 in November compared to a loss of 190,000 in October.  And Dow Jones has an estimate of -125,000.

The good news is that the weekly jobless claims have been better or less-bad and have been under 500,000 for the last two weeks.  But today’s reading showed an uptick in the army of unemployed measured by the continuing jobless claims as that figure rose by 28,000 to 5,465,000.

In the White House jobs summit today, both Vice President Biden and President Obama noted the limited ability of the government to create jobs outside of fostering the environment for businesses to operate.  And President Obama specifically noted that the private sector is where jobs have to come from.  He noted how he wants ideas to create jobs immediately and how he is willing to take “every responsible step” to accelerate job creation.  The figure being used for the “jobs saved” is now put at 1.6 million, although we have not found any two independent sources which can agree on whether any real jobs have been saved let alone whether this is a real figure.  Further, Obama noted that the true economic recovery can only come from the private sector.

Now before any accusations are made here about manipulation or criticism on either side, The President, regardless of who is the President that year, has historically always had access to Labor Department data at a minimum of on a preliminary basis before the release is made.  That has believed to have been the case under Bush junior, under Clinton, under Bush senior, and probably for years and years back before then.  After all, the President almost always makes at least a brief speech about employment very shortly after the data is out and those are not thrown together in two minutes.

Based on the tone of the President’s brief speech this afternoon, it seems more likely than not that the President was at a minimum not signaling anything less-bad than the 10.2% rate already there in the official unemployment rate that will be released Friday at 8:30 AM.  And a “guesstimate” would seem for a slight uptick on that official unemployment rate.

JON C. OGG