" I believe that there have been repeated attempts to influence prices in the silver markets. There have been fraudulent efforts to persuade and deviously control that price. Based on what I have been told by members of the public, and reviewed in publicly available documents, I believe violations to the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) have taken place in silver markets and that any such violation of the law in this regard should be prosecuted."
- Bart Chilton, Commissioner, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), October26th, 2010
What a difference a month makes. Now that Greece has been papered over, the bulls are back in full force, pumping up the equity markets and celebrating every passing data point with positive exuberance. Let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet, however. Very little has actually changed for the better, and it's certainly too early to start cheerleading a new bull market.
Take the latest US unemployment numbers, for example. There was much excitement about the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report which announced that US unemployment remained unchanged at 8.3% during the month of February.2 The market was particularly enamored by the BLS's insistence that non-farm payrolls increased by 227,000 during the month, as well as its upward revision of the December 2011 and January 2012 jobs numbers. Lost in all the excitement was the Gallup unemployment report released the day before, which had February unemployment increasing to 9.1% in February from 8.6% in January and 8.5% in December.3 Granted, the Gallup methodology is slightly different than that used by the BLS, but even if Gallup had applied the BLS's seasonal adjustment, they would have still come out with an unemployment rate of 8.6%, which is considerably higher than that produced by the BLS.4 We all know which number the pundits chose to champion, but the Gallup data may have been closer to the truth.
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