Brilliant! It was absolutely brilliant!
As you know by now, the Labor Department last Friday announced that the country had lost another 36,000 jobs in February.
Sure, that’s a lot fewer than the amount of jobs the economy had been shedding last year. But if the pace of early 2009 had been maintained, none of us would be working by now.
So the slowdown in bad news was to be expected.
The brilliance of what Washington did with last Friday’s numbers comes in the perception.
As I told readers in last Thursday’s column, Americans were about to get snowed. If the February labor numbers were bad, the Obama administration was going to blame the recent snowstorms.
And, as I also mentioned in that column, the storms really wouldn’t be a factor regardless of whether the number was good or bad.
Only two of the three storms fell within the reporting period. And even then, those two were long enough to have caused people to lose work for all but one day of the reporting period.
Still, the Obama administration got people in the financial markets to expect a bad report because of the blizzards.
In fact, as I reported, economic adviser Larry Summers went on CNBC and — unchallenged by any of its journalists — said that past blizzards had caused the government to report a monthly loss of 100,000 to 200,000 jobs.
Well, Wall Street figured Summers actually knew what he was talking about, although it would have been the first time.
As I was researching my column last Wednesday, the experts in the financial markets were expecting a loss of just 20,000 jobs in the Friday report. By the time Friday rolled along, Summers had ingeniously conditioned people to anticipate worse.
By then, expectations had deteriorated and the experts were thinking that the loss would be in the 68,000 range.
So, the actual loss of 36,000 jobs was great news, at least as far as the politicians and Wall Street were concerned.
The stock market rallied nicely on the “good” news, although it was a one-day event.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) even went as far as to say it was a “big day” for America because only 36,000 lost their jobs in February. (In fact, he first said something even dumber before he corrected himself.)
And President Obama figured he’d side with Summers by claiming that the snowstorms “had a depressing effect” on the jobs figures.
So I’m going to set the record straight. Here, Mr. President, is what the Labor Department actually said about the February storms’ effect on the job market.
The department explained in its release that “severe winter weather in parts of the country may have affected payroll employment and hours, however, it is not possible to quantify precisely the net impact of the winter storm on employment estimates.”
But in a boxed footnote, the department explained there really wasn’t much of an impact at all because “workers who received pay for any part of the [survey’s] pay period, even one hour, are counted in the February payroll employment figures.”
In last week’s column I told you the criteria was a single day. Now the Labor Department said workers are considered employed even if they get an hour’s pay.
Which of the two storms in the survey period — both of which lasted two days — would have caused a single worker to not have received even one hour of wages over a full pay period?
Now, I’ll address Sen. Reid’s point. His so-called big day will arrive when the economy is creating more than 100,000 jobs a month, the amount most economists believe is necessary just to absorb the new people coming into the workforce — not when the economy is still shedding jobs.
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During the Big East basketball tournament last year, league offi cials expressed concern to me that if the economy was still bad in 2010, fans wouldn’t be willing to pay the big bucks to come to New York, es pecially for the early rounds of their com petition.
Well, the economy is still bad and the tournament starts today.
We’ll soon see if fans of the league’s out-of-town teams are willing to foot the bill for travel and hotels, in addition to tickets, in this economy. john.crudele@nypost.com