00:00President Trump posted a chart on social media yesterday that included figures from the yet-to-be-released December employment report that came out today.
00:09Let's get more insight now from Mike McKee, Bloomberg's international economics and policy correspondent.
00:14So I guess the implication, or when I first read this headline, what I thought is, oh, you could have had early information on the jobs report.
00:23But then so could anyone who follows the president's truth social feed?
00:27Yeah, you would have to follow the truth social feed or one of the aggregators who would push it out.
00:32You'd have to be on social media, as it were.
00:34You'd have to be paying attention.
00:36And you'd also have to pretty good have an idea of what the president was saying.
00:40It appears that he wanted to brag about job creation under his administration from January to January, so he published a total number of jobs created during the year.
00:50But the problem was is it included the figures for December.
00:54And December's figures not only added to it, but subtracted some because of the revisions.
01:01And you would have had to parse all that out.
01:03So I'm not thinking that he was trying to give somebody an advanced look so they could make money on it.
01:10I think it was just probably a mess up in terms of, you know, security of it.
01:15Because the White House gets the information at 6 p.m. on the night before the job's released from the BLS.
01:21And the president's not, nobody in the administration is, in theory, supposed to comment on it until an hour after it's released.
01:29Yeah, but if you're the president, like, you're kind of the chief in classifying or unclassifying information.
01:34I should point out it also does look like it was scanned, just given the distortedness of it.
01:38I don't know if and...
01:39Well, what it looks like is it was a chart maybe that the Council of Economic Advisors created and gave to him and took a picture or somebody, Natalie Harp, took a picture and pushed it out for him.
01:49But your point is, I think your point stands, that if the president decides he wants to share that information, that seems to be in his prerogative.
01:55And it's in the public sphere, so trading on that wouldn't be trading on inside information.
02:00Right.
02:01If you had that information and traded on it, you wouldn't have violated the law.
02:06And we've seen that before sometimes when the statistical agencies accidentally release something early.
02:11Back in his first term, the president announced something about the jobs report earlier than he was supposed to.
02:16And then they sort of backed off, you know, how we get the interview with the Labor Department people and everything.
02:21They shut that off for a month or two to make sure nothing happened, but now it happened again.
02:28And probably won't happen again, but as you point out, Danny, especially with this president, what the president decides is what the president decides.
02:37And I would just like to point out again, even if you somehow could divine what the retractions to unemployment, what the numbers actually would have been from this,
02:45doesn't mean you would have gotten the market move right, because it is not always logical how that unfolds.
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