With the recent announcement from the U.S. Department of Labor that 217,000 jobs have been added to the mix for the month of May, we have now passed a critical crossroad, recovering all the jobs lost since the financial crisis of 2008. In response, the stock market rallied, continuing the momentum that was built from the prior day's speculation of positive employment data. At time of writing, the benchmark S&P 500, which tracks the performance of large capitalization companies, is sitting within spitting distance of 1,950 points. The venerable Dow Jones, on the other hand, is playing the records tango with its own set of weighted averages, sitting inside a hundred points of the 17,000 mark. Good times, it seems, is upon us. So what could possibly be the problem?

The basis is a lie.

Let me share a story. Several years ago, I, along with a friend, was taking advantage of a local Walmart's embarkation towards a 24-hour schedule. At the time, the idea seemed ludicrous to me yet that notion was immediately quieted when my friend viscerally introduced me to what would later become a more commonly accepted paradigm : the never-ending consumer retail cycle. During the course of shopping, I picked up a few knick-knacks while my friend simply needed a new toothbrush. In order to make the journey quicker and more convenient, I offered to have him put the toothbrush on my tab. After the transaction was completed, I joked that he owed me half of the total transaction amount, an inside reference to our bill-splitting process when we would visit various eateries around town. He countered, as expected, that just because an item of his was included in a transaction does not mean that he is liable for other items within the same transaction.

While this is a very logical concept amongst economists, accountants, and anyone that has a modicum of basic reasoning abilities, the Department of Labor thinks otherwise. The number of jobs isn't nearly as important as its compositional base. In other words, if a million engineering jobs were lost in the recession, a recovery cannot occur, at least within this industry, until a million engineering jobs are once again restored.

I speak extensively about this deception of rhetoric in my e-book, "The Renaissance Paradox." Essentially, the government is allowed to get away with murder because of their duplicitous usage of statistics and the growing cognitive dissonance  within the general American public that cannot seem to connect dots together unless there is an app for it.

Yes, Mr. President, thank you for creating those 200,000 jobs and recovering in four years what we lost in two. My question though, and the question that every American should be asking is, what kind of jobs have you created? Are these government mandated construction jobs, building roads to nowhere for the simple reason of merely satisfying a bureaucratic code? Or are these jobs of inherent merit, jobs whose end-product could potentially result in a technological or geopolitical advantage in an ever-competitive global business eco-system?

Unfortunately, what we find through a preponderance of evidence is that skilled jobs are replaced with menial or temporary jobs. Since that is the case, this recovery rhetoric is based on a false premise. Just like my friend who protested the additional charge of items that were not his simply on the basis that his item happened to be on the same bill, the government is crediting itself for a recovery that is in name only. If we assume that the 8 million jobs that were lost prior to the 2008 crisis had an average salary of $50,000, then we should have the right to know what the average salary is for the 8 million jobs that have now been restored.

This should be the mainstream media's job : they should press the administration and the government agencies responsible for the various employment statistics to understand the true context. As is usual with the lumbering bureaucracies, no one wants to offer the transparency that has been the promise of so many political campaigns, especially when we are so close to yet another political campaign.

My friend had a veto in his objection. The American people do not. We are beholden to the whims, quarries, and outright lies of the government on the coerced framework that their perspective is the truth. Any attempt to redress this clear misalignment in framework is met with ridicule : why would you dare argue with what is patently obvious? 

I guess we will all just have to wait for the next memo...

Just what is in a title? Apparently, a mouthful when you are dabbling with the sometimes relevant, always painful world of economic theory. Luckily, I've engaged the help of Dr. George Cooper, a former fund manager at Goldman Sachs who coined the brilliantly militaristic phrase above.

So what is pre-emptive asymmetric monetary policy? It's a strategy employed by a central bank to artificially combat an anticipated wrinkle in the monetary equilibrium, mostly due to the potential pressures of political downfall should the economy collapse prematurely (ie. right before voters hit the polls). On the surface, if one trusted the "wisdom" of their national central bank, this theoretically would be a good thing : after all, no one wants to suffer through a recession or depression if it could be avoided with a little fiscal massaging.

In reality, things are never that easy. We really don't need to play "fact-checking" with each other as if this were a presidential debate : recent and not so recent history and the collective consciousness of the American people all point to evidence of dramatic economic crises, and the management of such events have arguably led to an even more tenuous situation.

But the real irony to pre-emptive asy...eh...can we just call it P.A.M.P.?  is that it should by default never be necessary. That's because most economists, and more importantly, central bankers throughout the world, ascribe to Efficient Market Hypothesis, that is, today's market prices, no matter what they are, correctly reflect assets' true values, based on both current economic conditions and the best estimate of how those conditions will evolve in the future (Dr. George Cooper, The Origin of Financial Crises).

Given that all assets are priced correctly at all times, there should be no need for any kind of intervention, inflationary or deflationary. After all, if markets are truly efficient as the name of the theory suggests, then whatever is occurring at any particular moment is the most ideal condition. Any intervention by human hands is sure to be less efficient and therefore, under the inverse principle of arbitrage (I'll explain this in a future blog), wholly undesirable.   

Of course, this would not be a popular slogan for the bankers and thus they give us our medicine, even if it's just a placebo.