Beware of expectations - high and low - in advance of Friday's jobs report

Rule #1: No one knows what the numbers will look like. Rule #2: No, really, they don't. The pointless guesswork that precedes the Friday employment report each month is made even more pointless by an economy that's become unusually difficult to read. That's why you see so many unemployment stories that have the words, "analysts were surprised..." The estimates on job creation last month are ranging from 150,000 to 300,000, with the consensus somewhere in the 200,000 220,000 area. That 220,000 figure becomes a kind of perception marker - anything less and there will be a sense of disappointment (a feeling that will be fueled by the GOP candidates). Anything over, say, 225,000 will be judged better than expected. Truth is, all recoveries, even the best ones (which this one is not), have better months than others, and since there's no way of measuring the economy on a real-time basis, there's also no way of knowing how significant a single month of data will turn out to be, especially considering that the single month will be revised several times in the next few months. By the way, the January employment numbers for California and L.A. County is also due out tomorrow morning.