The Momo's are at it again.

I don't like to post when there is really nothing to say. The last several trading days you would think that the markets have been stuck in neutral. Today the market is rallying for no good reason which just means traders are just testing the waters to see if they can suck in as many folks as possible before pulling the rug out from under them. We are in that twilight zone where all news is good news and all the Momo's need is a little encouragement and they jump in with both feet.

This mornings miss on the ADP jobs number for NFP report is typical of the news of late. And as is always the case when the numbers are bad, they are announced with the standard pre-qualifier "unexpected miss". Below is a comment from TrimTabs, courtesy of Zerohedge, that shows you that anyone studying the economy seems to know:

“The weak job growth in January has us concerned,” says Madeline Schnapp, Director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs. “It appears that the economy has hit stall speed due to lackluster demand and a deleveraging consumer who would rather save than spend.”

“We see nothing on the horizon to knock the economy out of its slow growth mode,” notes Schnapp.  “The economy faces substantial headwinds from negative real wage and salary growth, high unemployment, waning government support, expiring tax incentives, contracting state and local governments, elevated fuel prices, and a sluggish housing market.”

After reading that, how could the government economists have "missed" the call due to unexpected inputs? Aren't they the jackasses that work these types of numbers day in and day out? There must be a reason for all those very high paid economists and analysts missing the numbers and its probably contained in the subject matter below: (Lance Roberts,StreetTalkLive.com and John Crudele, New York Post)

ECONOMY WORSE OFF THAN YOU THINK
Posted by Lance Roberts on Tuesday, 31 January 2012 13:50

NEW YORK POST
By JOHN CRUDELE
Last Updated: 12:34 AM, January 31, 2012

The economy did horribly in the last three months of 2011.
I know that's not what you've been hearing.

During this past Christmas season you were first told that consumers were dying to get to the malls and shop. That turned out to be true — for a couple of days at least, while stores were desperately discounting everything they had.

Then you were told that manufacturers were having a bang-up month and that automakers were selling cars like it was the old days.

And Apple — who could forget Apple? — was selling iAnythings like they were some sort of lifesaving device and every American was in the hospital emergency room.Last Friday the Commerce Department released its tally of business conditions in October, November and December. And it was, well, quite disappointing if you actually know what to look at.The headline number you saw on the evening news that night and in the newspapers on Saturday was this: the nation's gross domestic product rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate in the 2011 fourth quarter, which was better than the 1.8 percent growth in the July-September period.In the first place, 2.8 percent isn't a good rate of growth for any year.Take out your calculator, divide 2.8 percent by the four quarters of the year, and you'll see that fourth-quarter growth — even if you take these numbers at face value — was just 0.7 percent.Tepid. Lukewarm. Disappointing. Not what should be happening four years into a recession (oh, right, that's supposed to be over) after the Federal Reserve has used all its tricks and our elected officials have bankrupted the country.But it gets worse.(If you start coughing up blood while reading this column I suggest you dial 911. Remember, I'm just the skeptical messenger trying to set things straight, so don't take it out on me.)And that meager 2.8 percent annual growth really isn't what it seems to be.That's because 75 percent of that 2.8 percent growth involved businesses restocking inventories. Who says? The Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, which released this data.So people like you and me weren't really buying all that stuff in the last months of 2011. It was businesses buying stuff and putting it on their shelves in hopes that people would soon come along and buy it from them.Inventories will only build up so much before companies say "no more." So these restockings are not considered a particularly good thing when the ultimate buyer — the consumer — is still uncooperative.But that wasn't the only scary thing in the GDP report. In fact, it wasn't even the most important thing.In order to get to that 2.8 percent growth the Commerce Department used a very unrealistic level of inflation in its calculations.Let me explain: The government comes up with a figure on how much it thinks the economy grew, or shrunk. Friday's figure was a first estimate for the fourth quarter, so most of the numbers used in the calculation are only guesstimates anyway. (But that's for a different story.)The government then takes that growth figure, subtracts the rate of inflation and comes up with the real growth it reports in its press release.So, in other words, if inflation is rising it reduces the rate of actual, after inflation, growth — which is the figure that Washington reports.In Friday's number the government used 0.4 percent as the rate of inflation. Zero. Point. Four. Percent.In which country is inflation that low? Certainly not in America. Absolutely not in the last four months of 2011.The consumer price index, which is put out by the US Census Bureau, had prices up 3 percent for the year.And the rate of inflation used in calculating the third-quarter 2011 GDP was 2.6 percent; in the first and second quarters, combined, the rate was 2.5 percent; it was 1.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.So how does the Zero-Point-Four-Freakin' percent sound now?That's how Commerce got to the not-very-inspiring 2.8 percent growth it reported last Friday.Let me put this another way in case you are missing my outrage.If the inflation figure used in last Friday's GDP figure had just remained the same as the 2.6 percent rate from the third quarter, Washington would have had to report fourth-quarter annualized growth of just 0.6 percent.(Calculation: Inflation was lowered by 2.2 percentage points. So subtract 2.2 percent from the 2.8 percent growth to get 0.6 percent.)And that's an annualized rate. So divide the 0.6 percent by four quarters and the economy expanded at an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny 0.15 percent in the fourth quarter.

 On Friday, the Labor Department will issue its employment report for January.Wall Street had better get out the Depends.

john.crudele@nypost.com

The numbers you get from the MSM media and the financial press are being massaged to the nth degree. This after all is an election year and the party in power owns the pen that prints the numbers. Take it for what its worth and only believe the numbers you see on your stock charts. Eventually they will lead you in the right direction. Still waiting for the direction to become clear.