evening wrap, february 11
market vibes
In the years 2024 and 2025, one hundred percent of NFP reports received at least one revision with an absolute average deviation of 50k–70k jobs (like today). All were subject to annual benchmark revisions of negative -818,000 jobs in 2024 and negative -911,000 jobs in 2025 for a cumulative downward revision of 1.7 million jobs in the two-year period.
Trump fired BLS director Erika McEntarfer on August 1, 2025 and nominated conservative economist E.J. Antoni in September 2025, pointedly remarking Antoni would reform the Bureau. Allow me to digress for a minute. During the last two years there have been “superusers” in possession of BLS algos allegedly reverse engineering data in advance and a long history of extraordinary pre election data.
Having said that… Opposition to E.J. Antoni among senior senators who claimed he was “a threat to data integrity,” was so intense Trump had to withdraw his nomination. It is my belief Antoni would have replaced the thousands of economists with AI data collection and analysis in real time; a DOGE 2.0.
In a sense, BLS data tills the soil in which media plants the seeds of opinion supporting”data dependent” policy that the FOMC harvests every eight weeks with a rate decision. The good part of an AI reform is its thesis is truth (per Joseph Goebbels). Will that devolve when the humans are gone? You decide.
in the markets today
Nothing happened. S&Ps settled unchanged in another day of vol control and premium decay. It seems obvious to a cynic that the data and talking points were scripted in advance to defer any rate-cut narratives. I keep CNBC and Varney on just to have some noise in the room and both were saying exactly the same thing today: “The economy is too hot to lower rates.”
It took the Dow a month to rally 2% to 50k. At this rate Trump’s 100k call will come to fruition in 2076.
