It "seems" that a bit of doubt seeped into an economy-related Associated Press report today. An hour later, it was gone.
An early report by Josh Boak with a 10:22 a.m. time stamp found at a subscribing outlet's site described job growth in the past 12 months as "seemingly robust." An hour later, in an expansion of that early report primarily covering today's government release on July retail sales, Boak, in collaboration with Anne D'Innocenzio, described it as "solid."
Records are made to be broken, but apparently government spending records are not meant to be reported. The Monthly Treasury Statement released today showed that the federal government spent a mind-boggling $374.86 billion in July. That's an all-time single-month record, surpassing the previous high of $369.39 billion "achieved" in August 2012. Yes, there was a calendar "quirk" which caused this month's report to include five Fridays of disbursements; but that happens four times a year, and a record is a record.
Two wire service dispatches covering the government's June Wholesale Sales and Inventories release either glossed over or completely ignored what others are saying about the report's impact on near-term economic growth.
The final sentence of an unbylined Reuters report vaguely referred to future impact by indicating that current inventory balances, which are bloated by historical standards, "would weigh on manufacturing and economic growth" (i.e., have a negative impact). Both Reuters and the AP's Josh Boak completely ignored a leading GDP forecaster's estimate that inventory buildups seen during the second quarter will cause a significant third-quarter pullback which will also knock down third-quarter economic growth considerably — and that was before today's news that the June buildup was even greater than expected. Boak's report also contained an utterly unsupportable "things are getting better" statement.
I noted on Sunday how former Associated Press reporter Philip Elliott, writing for Time Magazine's Time.com website, joined the Scott Walker pile-on brigade criticizing the Wisconsin Governor's reasonable — arguably to a fault — position that he doesn't personally know whether Barack Obama is a Christian.
A separate post by Elliott, which covered a weekend retreat hosted by Charles Koch, originally carried a headline so obviously outrageous that it should never have gotten past him (though, to be fair, he may not have been responsible for creating it) or Time's editors (if they exist) for more than a few minutes after it appeared. Readers will see that headline after the jump (HT Mary Katharine Ham at Hot Air):
These economics reporters at the Associated Press have become experts at deadpan humor.
Earlier today, I noted how the wire service's Christopher Rugaber told readers, in the wake of a government report showing the lowest wage and benefit increases on record, that "the job market is not yet back to full health." No kidding, Chris. On top of that, the AP's Martin Crutsinger reacted to yesterday's tepid report on gross domestic product, which was accompanied by significant downward revisions to the past three years, by expressing "concerns that the U.S. economy has entered a period of historically slow growth." Dude, we have been living through historically slow growth for six years, ever since the recession officially ended in the middle of 2009.
Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press and the "expert" he quoted in his writeup on the government's awful Employment Cost Index report seemed to be taking their cues from Steven Wright's deadpan comedy act. The problem, of course, is that they were writing and saying isn't funny at all.
Rugaber, with his "expert" help, assembled an impressive array of understatements and misstatements in the wake of the smallest reported quarterly increase in U.S. worker pay on record. His worst characterization: "[T]he job market is not yet back to full health."
The bar-lowering in the business press continues.
In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":
The news out of Venezuela has apparently become so grim that the arguably Chavista-sympathetic press barely bothers to report it in any kind of sutstantive fashion. Inflation has gone wild, the level of violent crime has become frightening, and the government has taken to jailing citizens who dare to tweet their dissatisfaction with the regime of Nicolas Makuro (note that the linked report was prepared by a freelance journalist and not one of the worldwide wires; where have they been while this has been going on?).
One telling Associated Press dispatch from Venezuela last week concerned what's left of the nation's food distribution system. The item revealed that the press refuses to get over its classist obsessions, even as an entire country falls apart. A video seen after the jump will show that the government's "solution" has no realistic chance of fixing the problem.
Yet another important economic statistic confidently predicted to rise has fallen — hard.
This time it was June's pending sales of existing homes. Just in time for summer, they were predicted to increase by a seasonally adjusted 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent. Instead they fell by 1.8 percent, the steepest drop since December 2013. Additionally, May's original 0.9 percent increase was revised down to 0.6 percent. This brought out yet another appearance of the dreaded "U-Word" ("unexpectedly") — accompanied, as usual, by excuses delivered by Victoria Stilwell at Bloomberg News (bolds are mine):
The Conference Board's July Consumer Confidence report released earlier today threw a heavy dose of cold water on the idea that the economy might finally achieve a broad-based, genuine recovery this year.
Despite month after month of "all is well" reporting — and excuse-making when all hasn't been well — from the U.S. business press, the American public has apparently finally figured out that all is far from well. July's overall reading of 90.9 was 8.9 points lower than June's 99.8, the biggest single-month drop in almost four years — something Reuters and Bloomberg News noted, but which, as would be expected, the Associated Press, the nation's de facto news gatekeeper, failed to report.
I guess the slogan of labor has changed from "Look for the union label" to "Look for the union waiver."
The Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story early this morning on an issue some people thought disappeared after its initial exposure two months ago. The issue is whether union workers should be exempt from minimum wage laws, especially the sky-high minimums being enacted in some U.S. cities. To those who have been unaware of the issue up until now and are thinking that all of this must be a joke — it's not. It's just that the press, which not coincidentally has a higher percentage of union members than the private sector as a whole, has barely noted it.
Based on how they handled it today, it's pretty obvious that the Associated Press's Ken Sweet and his wire service's headline writers want the lowest possible number of users of their reporting — consumers and subscribing print and broadcast outlets — to know about the mainland Chinese stock market's historically deep 8.5 percent Monday dive.
It took four paragraphs for Sweet to get to the specifics. What preceded it was clearly intended to create an "It's No Big Deal, so you can move on to something else" impression.