by Calculated Risk on 5/06/2013 09:47:00 PM

The recent controversy surrounding historian Niall Ferguson reminds me of this post some time ago by Invictus: Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Going Viral?

This post [is] about [Ferguson's] recent Bloomberg TV interview with Erik Schatzker and Sara Eisen. And, in particular, one very specific part of that interview where Ferguson makes what is well beyond what I could even charitably refer to as a rookie mistake.
...
At 3:55 into the clip, Sara asks Ferguson about the private sector job gains versus the massive public sector job losses we’ve seen under Obama. ...

Here’s what, by my transcription, Ferguson had to say (emphasis mine):

Well, that’s not really a part of the argument I made in the piece. The point I made in the piece was that the stimulus had a very short-term effect, which is very clear if you look , for example, at the Federal employment numbers there’s a huge spike in early 2010 and then it falls back down.

Niall, babe, I got one word for you: Census (pdf).

So basically Ferguson thought incorrectly the short term hiring for Census 2010 was related to the stimulus (back then I was reporting the jobs report using both the headline number and the ex-Census number). Very amusing ...

Tuesday economic releases:
• At 10:00 AM ET, the BLS will release the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for March. The number of job openings has generally been trending up, and openings were up 11% year-over-year in February.  That was most job openings since May 2008. 

• Also at 10:00 AM, the Trulia Price Rent Monitors for April. This is the index from Trulia that uses asking house prices adjusted both for the mix of homes listed for sale and for seasonal factors.

• At 3:00 PM, the Fed will release Consumer Credit for March. The consensus is for credit to increase $15.0 billion in March.