Wall Street Journal children at it again - confusing the economic news with hysterical wailing

The uneducated attention deficit disordered children employed by the Wall Street Journal as journalists are at it again, writing incoherent drivel on the latest economic news from the auto industry. These disgraces to the profession manage this morning to convey two contradictory notions in one short story - an extraordinary accomplishment in obfuscation.

The frontpage headline is "U.S. Auto Sales Continue to Skid" which is supposed to give you an allusion of the industry as out of control, or perhaps as failing to gain traction, whatever you care to make of that smart-alecky metaphor. This is followed by this first par: "GM, Toyota and Ford reported U.S. sales declines of more than 30% for December, capping off a dismal year for the auto industry. Chrysler's plunged 53%."

From this teaser on p1 Sharon Terlep and Matthew Dolan with contributions mind you from Kate Linebaugh and John F. Murphy - a veritable kindergarten is needed to compose a couple of hundred words of nonsense - lead off on the business pages: "U.S. auto sales tumbled again in December..." then "For the month sales of cars and light trucks fell 36%... an improvement over both November and October..."

Now what the heck is it, l'il guys?

If sales just "tumbled again" and "fell 36%" and "plunged" and "declined" how is there also an improvement - except for a bunch of baby masochists?

This is enough kiddie antics to get an old fogey dizzy.

Don't let's pull a punch here.

The Journal's reporting from the likes of Sharon Terlep and Matthew Dolan, with contributions from Kate Linebaugh and John F. Murphy is so goddam awful you have go to the primary source to make any sense of it at all.

What they are doing, you discover is mixing up two different comparisons.  All that tumbling and falling and plunging and declining is month-on-same-month-a-year-earlier. It's spectacular to be sure, but it's old news.

For three months now the month on same-month-last-year has been down by just these kinds of numbers.

Old news kids, old news.

Yet by trumpeting "declines of more than 30% for December" they misleadingly suggest that December has seen a continued downtrend.  Where do they get this stuff from?

Do the car companies each report this data on the same day? Unlikely.

Here courtesy Google:

http://www.motorintelligence.com/m_frameset.html

Go to the Autodata Corp's Motor Intelligence and for the December on December numbers by different car companies download the data they use from New Vehicle Sales. Then see see SAAR Data for the spreadsheet of the seasonally adjusted annual rate for US light vehicle sales month by month and you get the real story which in adult language is:

- Dec was 10.32m vs Nov 10.18m, up a mere 1.4%, not an "improvement," probably just statistical noise, better described as level with Nov

- Dec, Nov, Oct were so similar (10.56m, 10.81m, 10.32m) it's possible we have reached a floor or bottom and that is just as easily read from the statistics as the hysterical tumbling, skidding, plunging and declining wails of the WSJ children

The 'picture' - the graph above - shows it well.

Of course rather than a bottom the last three months of 2008 may turn put to be just a 'shelf' before another decline in 09... but the WSJ kids wailing over Dec numbers which simply repeated Oct and Nov numbers does nothing to elucidate either possibility.

TOLLROADSnews 2009-01-06