NFP = Nonfarm Payroll, Friday’s report. The whole thing is a good discussion, but this was the part I wanted to draw attention to:

Seasonal wildcard (0 to +several hundred thousand). Believe it or not, without seasonal adjustment, payrolls always fall in January—or at least, they have for the more than 70 years of data that we examined. On a not-seasonally adjusted basis, payrolls have fallen by 2.6 million to 3.6 million every January in the past decade. A variety of factors contribute to this decline, including post-holiday season layoffs in retail, seasonal downturn in construction, and year-end purging of previously departed individuals from payroll records. This seasonal pattern is important for the following reason: After a year of exceptionally large job losses and very weak hiring, there may have been fewer seasonal employees to lay off this January. This would result in a less dramatic decline in not-seasonally adjusted payrolls, and therefore a potentially large seasonally adjusted increase.

The other thing I should mention is that conspiracy theorists right now are up in arms at Goldman routinely under-estimating official numbers, then magically profiting when the reports are released. Do the prop traders know something the analysts don’t? I think this is more a factor of selective memory than anything of substance.