Quote:
Originally Posted by de captain
You either understand the implications, which don't align w/ the narrative you've been pushing since you started posting here, or you don't. If you have a position then elucidate it.
I suspect this is your problem here, because you're pushing a particular narrative and working backwards to support that narrative no matter what, you assume that's what I'm doing and just push back as though it's some religious argument that where you're pushing one viewpoint and I'm pushing another viewpoint. I'm not pushing anything - just pushing back against flawed reasoning. The lack of rigor is what I find problematic. If you actually pay attention, you'd find that I've been fairly neutral the entire time, only pointing out relatively flaws in specific narratives being pushed, and instead of pushing specific narratives myself, generally opting to offer frameworks to help anchor such arguments. To me, what's important isn't whether the economy is good or bad now, or the market will go up or down, but rather having a consistent way to think about these kinds of things that can be applied to other situations. Just because there are tons of awful takes on the macro and the stock market here on the bear side and I opted to correct them doesn't mean I hold the opposite viewpoint. You should be able to construct a bear argument that I find compelling - I just haven't seen one here.
More specifically, you can't just come up with a story (PPP boosting employment), realize that this is a potential explanation for some empirical observation (the 2.7M increase in temporary unemployment from April to May), then just attribute the latter to the former, without being able to quantify the impact or examining other factors. I guess you could do that, but that limits the effectiveness of your analysis and ultimately your ability to understand things. You're just assuming the conclusion and never rigorously testing any of your preconceived notions.
Again, I'm not motivated one way or another, but I suspect that you're making these errors (did it not occur to you to consider that both job reports are affected by PPP) because you are motivated. You were sure things are bad, but the job report says things aren't that bad, so you're uncritically accepting theories that reconcile these two. I could be wrong here but I don't see how any neutral person would consistently make mistakes in one direction.