The "Smiling Contrarian"
who is a strong contender for Fed Chair!
The president who tried to overthrow an election is now threatening to undercut or destroy—with similar accusations of “rigging”—any institution that could document his failures or malfeasance. The BLS, who dared release bad employment news, is the latest target.
Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that job growth during Trump’s term was much lower than previously estimated. Trump responded by firing the bureau’s commissioner, Erika McEntarfer. He claimed, baselessly, that the numbers were “rigged,” and he falsely alleged that the bureau had waited until after the 2024 election to issue a similar revision of job numbers under Joe Biden.
Donald Trump:
In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad — Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 Presidential Election, and then, those numbers were “taken away” on November 15, 2024, right after the Election, when the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM. Jerome “Too Late” Powell is no better! But, the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!
Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, a possible (even likely) appointee for Fed Chair made up a story to keep himself in Trump´s good graces.
Hassett knows the bureau isn’t partisan. He also knows it revised Biden’s job numbers two and a half months before the 2024 election—not afterward, as Trump pretended. In fact, BLS delivered the bad news about Biden’s numbers on August 21, 2024, in the middle of the Democratic convention. That was the day before Kamala Harris delivered her acceptance speech. The timing for Democrats couldn’t have been worse!
On Meet the Press, following the release, Kristen Welker asked Hassett whether he had evidence that the BLS numbers were “rigged.” Hassett said yes. The “hard evidence,” he told Welker, was that the revision of Biden’s numbers “came out after he withdrew from the presidential campaign” on July 21, 2024. Hassett said this was part of “a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder” about the bureau’s trustworthiness.
He corrected Trump. The revisions did not come after the election, but more than two months before, in August. But to give it a “Trump spin”, he said that it came after Joe Biden dropped out of the race! (as if that were relevant!).
After the Sunday shows, critics chastised [this is good] Hassett. He could have backed down. But on Monday, when CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin pointed out that the 2024 revision preceded the election, Hassett repeated the same maneuver. The revision “was after Joe Biden had withdrawn,” Hassett told Sorkin. He concluded, “It’s a massive failure of our data agencies to be making willy-nilly changes that are difficult to understand and often have apparently partisan patterns.”
What you notice, in all those interviews, is that Hassett is always smiling, even when he´s speaking!
Hassett became a “household name” when he co-wrote (with James Glassman) the book Dow 36,000 at the peak of the dotcom bubble in 1999, saying stocks could “quadruple tomorrow and still not be too high”.
Alas, the Dow soon sank into a 10 year “drought”, bottoming when the “Great Financial Crisis” hit.
Hassett resurfaced as markets bottomed, accusing President Barack Obama of declaring a “war on business” and warning: “No wonder that markets are imploding around us.” Within weeks, an 11-year bull market began, only interrupted by Covid-19, as the Dow was on the cusp of breaking above Hassett´s 36000 mark!
The chart illustrates.
All in all, for Trump, Kevin Hassett seems the “perfect Fed Chair appointee”! He´ll do his bidding with a smile on his face!