MacroScope

The euro zone economy may be doing far worse than most economists want to believe. That’s not good news for a central bank trying to rescue the single currency through a hotly-contested bond purchasing programme that has yet to get started.

The latest flash purchasing managers’ indexes, which cover thousands of euro zone companies, suggest the third quarter will mark the euro zone’s worst economic performance since the dark days of early 2009, according to Markit, which compiles them.

They predict the economy likely shrank by 0.6 percent in the quarter that finishes at the end of this month.

That’s far gloomier than the consensus 0.2 percent decline predicted in the last week’s Reuters poll of around 35 economists, and even more pessimistic than the poll’s lowest forecast of 0.5 percent.

Aside from some German resilience, there was an unexpectedly severe decline reported by French firms. Flash PMIs don’t cover Spain and Italy – those figures come out at the end of the month. But it’s a pretty sure bet there’s been a deterioration there since last month.

High inflation is a drag on economic growth in the world’s second most populous country and matters immensely to over 400 million people, or over a third of India’s total population, who struggle to earn enough to feed their families three meals a day.

The particularly volatile nature of inflation in India has confounded policymakers and small business owners and has left economists, who are often running complex statistical models based on a dearth of reliable data, with a poor forecasting record.

To be fair, predicting economic data can be pretty tough in a country where collecting and reporting national statistics is still in its infancy stage. Provisional numbers are often completely revised away.

Not that the battered U.S. labor market needs anymore bad news, but here it is: A new report that derives employment growth from tax data suggests recent strides have been even meeker than the official Labor Department data suggests.

The January jobs report is due out on Friday, and analysts in a Reuters poll are forecasting the jobless rate remained stuck at 8.5 percent while a median of 150,000 net new positions were created last month, down from 200,000 in December.

Not so fast, say analysts at investment research firm TrimTabs. They cull figures on tax withholding to generate what they say is a more accurate real-time reading of job market conditions. Their findings are grim:

The next time anyone questions the reliability of Chinese statistics, they should first spare a thought for the sensitive, earnest souls who gather the data. The National Bureau of Statistics asked its employees to craft poems to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. 

Like Chinese growth surging beyond economists' forecasts, their literary talents are sure to leave critics gasping for breath.

Here are three of the entrants in the poetry competition, "Statistics Affection: We Walk Together".