Just a note on Wall Street economists

YAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Here's what I mean. The formerly intelligent people at Lehman Brothers, who several months ago drank some kind of idiot juice, squatted down and, after much grunting, squeezed out this turd today:

The Manpower survey was unchanged at +20, the same level it has been at since the second quarter. This suggests that there will be little acceleration in the rate of job growth. However, because this survey only explains a small portion of the variation in payrolls, payrolls could still increase or decrease within a broad range relative to the last quarter. Nevertheless, this report provides further support to our view on payrolls –- we look for payrolls to average 170,000 during the fourth quarter.

Now put on your thinking caps, Drew Matus and Joe Abate, Lehman Brothers economists, because it's time for Fun With Logic!

In the second, third and fourth-quarter surveys, the Manpower Survey's seasonally adjusted "employment index" has held steady at exactly 20 (though the non-seasonally-adjusted numbers actually worsened in the fourth quarter).

As Drew and Joe point out, you can't make a one-to-one comparison between the Manpower Survey's index and the number of new non-farm payroll jobs counted every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But, even accounting for that margin of error, you can't deny that the Manpower Survey's clear message is that corporate hiring plans have been the same, more or less, since April.

But those are just the plans, what companies promised or expected to do with hiring when asked, months in advance, by clipboard-toting Manpower employees. Here's what they actually did with hiring, as measured by the BLS' monthly growth in payrolls:

April: 324,000
May: 208,000
June: 96,000
July: 73,000
August: 144,000

Does that look very steady to you? Of course not.

Granted, the average of those 5 numbers is a tidy 169,000 -- almost exactly what Drew and Joe forecast.

But you can't just ignore the obvious deceleration in the numbers between April and July. You can't just ignore the fact that, while the 2Q average rate of job growth was 209,000, the 3Q average rate of growth slowed way down, to 108,000 -- in clear contravention of the Manpower survey's message of stability.

And we can't yet assume that August's number was the start of a new trend upward, which would be necessary to arrive at the job growth promised by Drew and Joe.

In other words, the Manpower survey does not at all "provide further support" for Drew and Joe's view on payrolls, which (I might add) has been consistently and woefully wrong every month but last month, when job growth somehow miraculously managed to meet the cowardly consensus on Wall Street, to which Drew and Joe have clung like tiny monkeys in the highest branch of a swaying baobab tree in a thunderstorm. Don't expect it to happen again, Drew and Joe!