I don't know why you make that claim except that, once you did, many other posts on this forum followed suit. In all honesty your claim (that zerohedge is a conspiracy site) and the ensuing posts looks more like conspiracy (blog-spamming or blog-misdirection) than does zerohedge.
zerohedge WAS once a decent current economics site that sometimes featured excellent articles but the responses of members began to decay. Today the responses are mostly noise and I rarely bother to visit zerohedge.
I disagree. I don't have an interest in digging through ZH posts to prove my point, but in general the spin of the site is conspiratorial in nature.
Whether it's the Fed is in it with the banks to provide free money to prop up the market, or the BLS number are not to be believed or trusted, or any other number of reoccurring themes, ZH is a conspiracy site.
The Fed, by it's own admission, saved the world from financial Armageddon during the last crisis by acting as a lender of last resort to many a large financial institutions. They also had private meetings with banks to try and stabilize the markets.
Whether they went too far with their monetary policy is something that we will only find out with time, but there is nothing conspiratorial here.
Not conspiratorial, but the government picking winners and losers is certainly ripe for abuse. The government's job is certainly not to use taxpayer's money to support businesses who made poor decisions (started with LTCM' bailout in 1997). The justification is always one of "saving the financial system from collapse", yet nothing was done since 2008 to break up the "too big to fail" entities.
BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices. As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision.
tptacek (IIRC quoting someone else) described it well: ZeroHedge is the conspiracy theory site without the conspiracies. Ignore the tone, take the analysis with a lot of salt, but do look at the data - they bring to the front a lot of data that no mainstream publication will show.
There are two things wrong with the common view of conspiracies:
1. That it is impossible or at least, extremely unlikely, for a group of people to meet in private and make plans to further their own agenda at the expense of others -- that's all a "conspiracy" is. It happens thousands of times per day at any scale of operations.
2. That you actually need conspirators for a conspiracy-equivalent effect to take hold. Do you remember the option backdating scandal? Turns out tens of companies did the same thing. Hundreds involved was aware, no one talked, until an outsider forced the SEC to respond. This doesn't need to be centrally orchestrated. Whether or not you consider this "a conspiracy" or not, doesn't matter. It was effectively a conspiracy against shareholders. Similarly, there's the still unfolding emission scandal which is (effectively) yet another large scale conspiracy, whether or not Mitsubishi and Volkswagen engineers met in a shady bar to co-ordinate their cheating or not.
> BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices.
See.. this is where you're completely wrong.
> As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision.
All BLS reports are revised -- they're surveys that are aggregated as firms respond. Their methodology is completely transparent.[1]
In fact, the BLS is so transparent that they actually keep a data series that tracks revisions to their own data with monthly history back to 1979! [2]
Their initial monthly jobs numbers in 2015 were overstated by an average of 4,000 jobs. However, in 2014, their initial jobs numbers were understated by 37,000 jobs. Does understating the initial numbers by nearly 40,000 jobs/month sound like the behavior of an agency trying to fool the public?
Conspiracy theories about public entities that report every single facet of their methodology, data, and metadata are silly.
> BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices. As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision.
That's how it is supposed to work, they do the best with the data they have and then update as more data comes in. They are trying to gauge hard to measure things using samples, it's a tricky business.
As for revising to the upside, it happens all the time. December and January were both revised upwards:
> The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for December was revised
from +262,000 to +271,000, and the change for January was revised from
+151,000 to +172,000. With these revisions, employment gains in December
and January combined were 30,000 more than previously reported.
I don't know why you make that claim except that, once you did, many other posts on this forum followed suit. In all honesty your claim (that zerohedge is a conspiracy site) and the ensuing posts looks more like conspiracy (blog-spamming or blog-misdirection) than does zerohedge.
zerohedge WAS once a decent current economics site that sometimes featured excellent articles but the responses of members began to decay. Today the responses are mostly noise and I rarely bother to visit zerohedge.