A Nation Managed by Misreads: Payroll Revisions, Rate Suppression, and the Debt Crisis

The BLS has come out with another huge rug-pull on its nonfarm payroll count. And also, predictably, this has triggered loud blathering from both Wall Street and the White House on behalf of exactly the wrong conclusion.

To wit, we don’t need any more Fed rate cuts! And we don’t need a new eruption of money-printing, either, because the real cost of debt is already dirt cheap.

For instance, here is the inflation-adjusted Fed funds rate over the last four decades:

Since the turn of the century, ...