Was Goldman Sachs Tipped Off About the Unemployment Number in Advance?

John Crudele is justifiably suspicious. He writes:

Another curious thing happened before the employment report was made public.

Sometime before late afternoon Thursday, Goldman Sachs suddenly broke with the Wall Street pack that was predicting a loss of 320,000 or so jobs in July.

A Goldman economist decided that the job losses would be 250,000 -- which, of course, is suspiciously close to the actual number. His previous guess was 300,000.

I'm sure this was purely a coincidence and that Goldman's legendary close ties with the government and US Treasury had nothing to do with the forecast change.

And, at the very least, I'm sure Goldman shared its incredibly prescient forecast with the rest of the world before making any trades based on this sudden vision

This isn't a game, folks, serious money can be made getting this data in advance.