Morning Audibles 6.09.10 Now I've Heard Everything

Headline on BLOOMBERG NEWS...

"Waste on Freight Cars Gains in Confirmation of Rebound"

I'm telling you people, you can't make this stuff up... Hear that people? Go back to buying stocks because Choo Choo Charlie is hauling more and more of the useless crap you've bought from the Chinese to the landfills...

Excerpt(s):

"Shipments of waste and scrap have a higher correlation with economic growth than coal or copper, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. (To see an Interactive Insight version of the story, click here.)


“It’s sort of like measuring horsepower by looking at the smoke coming out of the tail pipe,” Carl Riccadonna, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. in New York, said in a telephone interview. “It’s consistent with our broader view that economic growth is accelerating.”

I don't want to list ALL the problems I have with this kind of analysis (or else I risk getting more confusing than the extrapolation of the story itself)...

My only "kinship" with this kind of article would be to say that, as a journalist, on a slow news day (such as perhaps, TODAY - [thanks to more "miracle kicksaves" in equities by an entity with a printing press]), one has to dig far into the nether regions to pull out a story, and slop it onto your plate like a prison chowline.

"It's sort of like measuring horsepower by looking at the smoke coming out of the tail pipe"... Can somebody please explain to CV how THAT is done, exactly?... If I'm out of my league with these new HIGH TECH forms of analysis, please somebody set me straight in the process...

And what's the data sample?

I mean, is there a new CZAR, or some position like that on the government payroll that you're paying to produce these helpful data bits? Does Bernanke get a 10,000 page report plunked on his desk to peruse while sipping on his morning kool-aid coffee?

CV has some possible explanations, ranging from the obvious:

- "Gee, I'm thinking that when people get booted out of their houses, office spaces are abandoned, and strip malls become ghost towns, there's potentially a lot of mess to clean up"
OR
- "Gee with a mobilized force dispatched to the Gulf area to clean up tar balls, there's gotta be a lot of waste to clean up in the process"

Or, I'm happy with the "outlandish" as well...

"Maybe those "shovel ready" jobs are just people on opposite sides of the CSX train tracks loading crap to be transported back and forth"

I know that there are some blogs who relish this type of data as TYPICAL... But please BLOOMBERG... Please!... Don't tell me that we're all "pinning our hopes for a recovery" on trash!