Is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Manipulating Data to Make the Economy Look Better Than It Is?

Bureau of Labor Statistic headquarters

ZeroHedge has a bombshell report out this morning: BLS Caught Fabricating Wage Data.

From the report:

What one sees here, as Andrew Zatlin of South Bay Research first noted, is that while the Total Private Average Weekly Earnings line posted another solid increase of 0.2% month over month, an upward revision from the previous month's 0.1%, when one looks at the components, it become clear that the BLS fabricated the numbers, and may simply hard-coded its spreadsheet with the intention of goalseeking a specific number.

Presenting Exhibit 1: Table B-3 in today's jobs report. What it shows is that whereas there was a sequential decline in the Average Weekly Earnings for Goods Producing and Private Service-producing industries which are the only two sub-components of the Total Private Line (and are circled in red on the table below) of -0.8% and -0.1% respectively, the BLS also reported that somehow, the total of these two declines was a 0.2% increase!

 But this is far from the full story.

I have a full report on my conversations with economists inside the BLS and what is really going on, in today's EPJ Daily Alert.

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 -RW