Dear John: Cyber safety’s up in the air

Dear John: How worried should we be about the money we have in savings banks if a cyber theft/attack occurs?

Is there any way we can better protect our life savings? S.M.

Dear S.M. That's a very good and timely question. And I wish I had a good answer, but there isn't one because this kind of theft is still very new.

Just last week JPMorgan Chase announced that 83 million customers' data had been breached by hackers.

As you probably know, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protects each account for up to $250,000. But that guarantee is supposed to protect against bank failure, not cyber fraud.

That's a point the FDIC stressed when JPMorgan and six other banks came under cyber attack earlier this year.

But it is unclear to me whether that was an official statement or simply an off-the-cuff remark made in response to the attacks at the time.

The banks' own insurance is supposed to protect depositors against cyber attacks. But we'll see how that works out if there are monetary losses from this latest hack and insurance companies try to pass the buck to Washington.

And we all know how good Washington is at protecting the little guy against the interests of the big banks.

Is there anything safer? You could, of course, buy physical assets like gold or real estate. Nobody can hack those. But you'll also have a tough time with liquidity. Try taking a Picasso to the grocery store for a bag of food.

Dear John: I have been reading your analysis on each employment report over the past several months. You have been consistently wrong.

Friday's data release is confirmation on how wrong you have been, especially after reading your article in early September on the August employment report and your outlook on the September report. What say you? R.A.

Dear R.A. Really!

I was correct when I said the August report would be weaker than expected.

And, starting in January, I was also correct that that month (released in February) would be weak.

And I was also correct that March, April and May would be stronger than expected because the Labor Department added a generous dose of jobs it thinks — but can't prove — were being created by newly formed companies.

And the rest of the months I made no prediction because the statistical quirks that I just mentioned weren't predominant enough.

So when you say I've been wrong, let me know exactly which months. And, yes, the September report that was released Friday was stronger than I thought it would be.

So that makes me 5-for-6 in calls this year. If you don't believe me, look it up.

Dear John: Second-quarter gross domestic product grew greater than 4 percent, while the last few reports are showing modest growth at best.

Seems that GDP analysis has the same problem as labor force reports — faked or deliberately spurious/manipulated data by politically motivated organizations.

My personal observation of a few manufacturing companies is that their inventories are building up faster than their shipments of completed products. Several of my colleagues with government contracts have been laid off or forced to re-employ at rates 20 percent to 30 percent lower than their current salaries.

Personally, my family and I have reduced our spending by over 15 percent since 2010 and it has remained pretty much static since then. So we are obviously not contributing to GDP growth.

This all goes to your observations and evidence regarding labor surveys and the talking-head babbling about GDP ups and downs. Basically, one has to come to the conclusion that we cannot believe anything the government says, since the hard evidence contradicts its utterances. A.Z.

Dear A.Z. Okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

What I have said is that the statistics that come out of the Census Bureau, and especially the jobless rate, is suspect. There is documented falsification and there was probably more.

But the problems with government stats go beyond cheating.

These numbers aren't — and never were — meant to give a snapshot of the economy. They are supposed to be revised and refined over the years until we know clearly what business was doing at some time in the past.

The problem is, Wall Street likes to gamble off these numbers. So the long view is lost. And the news media — and this can't be helped — tries to make stories from statistics that aren't really refined.

It would be like a sports reporter saying the Yankees won a game just because the score was 5-0 in the fifth. Clearly, the game isn't over yet, especially if David Robertson is going to pitch.

And, quite frankly, the other problem is that many journalists don't understand the economic numbers, and Wall Street wants you to be fooled.

What's happening right now: The economy in the US is growing moderately and job growth is modest. And if you look below the surface, the modest number of jobs we are creating aren't good ones.

So, despite a lot of effort on the part of a very risk-taking Federal Reserve, the economy is blah.

And because of the debt this country is saddled with, blah may be the best we can ever do. The next move in the economy could easily be down rather than up.

So, your observations are useful and probably on target. And — yes — the economic numbers don't always tell the story. But it's not always because someone has their thumb on the scale.

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