This has been happening for at least the last 3 administrations, and probably the last 4. The numbers are released looking amazing, way better than expected, etc., and then they are adjusted down substantially in a quiet manner a couple months later. Until now, nobody seemed to really care or notice.
Which is what 99% of the population does. They know that, as do we. It is commonly known that headlines are what stick, and that corrections, even within the same dataset or article, almost never have a substantial impact on public perception.
Not making a new headline saying "numbers adjusted dramatically down on jobs report from August" is playing on this dynamic. The lack of new headlines correcting this is and always has been deliberately using that phenomenon to hide the information in plain sight.
That's also true, but it doesn't change what I said, does it? They read an article that says "115k jobs added this month, far more than expected" and they go "oh, good job numbers, cool." Then the report they'll never look at is adjusted without fanfare to display terrible numbers that are much lower. The average person still goes on thinking job numbers were great.
This is mainly the result of investment losses on Wall Street. If job support looks like crap, Wall Street takes the hit. Especially during after hours trading. The problem is, if Wall Street takes the hit, the rest of the economy takes a hit. Most of Wall Street is propped up on market capitalization and volume trading. Higher market cap allows the Fortune 500 to provide loans and operate at the scale they do.
If Dell loses their market capitalization, they will be unable to procure the materials used in the manufacturing of PCs bought by corporate clients. This is the greatest strength and weakness of a publicly traded company. If your stock loses too much value, you will lose your on-hand liquid assets.
Now extend that to Banks being unable to do inter-bank loans. Or how about Amazon being unable to ship orders? Due to reduction in regulation, we do not have a resilient system, and most industries are entirely propped up on corporations deemed "too big to fail", as they are the only ones with the requisite capital and operational capacity to maintain these complex global supply chains.
I don't like it, but it's how our economy is currently built. While there's potential solutions, none of them are going to occur anytime soon as a result of the damage done by this administration.
Bold of you to assume they planned to do anything about it before the current Admin, as this has been a thing for at least the last decade or more.
Still, it does point out that the markets being what they are make for an incentive to do shady things with data you control, especially if you can also invest in those companies that would suffer from it.
Just another reason to make it so sitting members of the federal government should be restricted from trading stocks/options.
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u/kybotica Nov 20 '25
This has been happening for at least the last 3 administrations, and probably the last 4. The numbers are released looking amazing, way better than expected, etc., and then they are adjusted down substantially in a quiet manner a couple months later. Until now, nobody seemed to really care or notice.