Cazenove's Jeffrey: The do's and don'ts of policymaking

Tick-list to assess our judgement of events.

It is a tough life being a professional economist. The man hours we spend making up stories to fit the 'facts', only to find the facts then change. It has been just so over the past three months.

Two successive reports from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, for August and September, suggested employment growth had weakened. Then we had the October report, which showed a much stronger gain than expected. The apparent weakening in the market was widely attributed to the impact of a slowdown in global manufacturing activity and therefore reduced demand for labour. Are employment figures the real reason the Fed is holding back on rates? This explanation always seemed dodgy, since job openings data indicated that demand had remained very strong. My explanation was that as unemp...