Weak job stats render the Fed a might-y mouse

F EDERAL

Reserve Chair Janet Yellen made her usual bipolar remarks Monday in a speech: Last week’s employment report was disappointing, she said, but the labor market was tightening (a good thing) and wages look like they were finally rising.

The economy might have weakened, Yellen said, but the gross domestic product, a measure of economic health, looks strong in the second quarter. Inflation — a good thing in the mind of the Fed — wasn’t high enough but it is getting there.

And she also stated the incredibly obvious in her usually obtuse way: The Fed will raise interest rates, but probably not now — maybe later, but it might not be able to because it might have to use “conventional means,” which means lowering interest rates, if the economy falters.

Phew! In other words, Yellen sounded like a politician and basically said nothing.

I’m now going to tell you how Yellen’s comments will sound if she re- mains as Fed chair (which she won’t, by the way) under the presidency of

Donald Trump (which is looking more likely). So, here’s a straight talkin’ Yellen, wearing — I imagine — an “It’s 5 o’clock Somewhere” tee.

YELLEN: “Good afternoon everyone. FYI, this is a freakin’ OMG moment for us at the Fed. President Trump is bustin’ our cajones, and I’m pretty sure it’s because the Fed is being run by a dame.

“The economy? I bet you want to know what the economy is doing. I could tell you this and tell you that. But the God’s honest truth is, I don’t know what the economy is doing. One minute it looks better, the next worse.

“If anyone out there knows, please let me know.

“President Trump has his ideas about a wall. Well, I’d like to build a wall around all my Fed presidents and lock them inside. Shut them all up. They don’t know what the freak they are talking about and they are making me stunad.

“I could go on about core inflation and rising wages, the U-6 unemployment rate and the labor participation rate. But I think by now you all know that this is total horse droppings! We don’t know what’s going on, and I’m not going to try to fool you anymore.

And, please, President Trump. I’d like to keep my job. See, I can straight-tawk with the best of them, ya’ know.”

TRUMP: “Who the hell is this woman? How did she keep her job this long? Fired!”

The House Oversight Committee, which is in charge of the Census Bureau, is meeting this week to discuss the decennial census that will take place in 2020 at an estimated cost of $13 billion.

The inspector general of the Commerce Department, which oversees Census for Congress, has been spanking Census for more than a year over things like expenses and lack of organization, all of which I’ve been exclusively reporting in this column.

So, it’s unlikely that the Oversight Committee, which investigated data falsification at Census a few years back after my investigation, will be very kind.

The Democrats are close to anointing Hillary Clinton as their presumptive candidate for president. I’ve said before that is the worst possible thing the party could do to itself.

Now I’ll explain why: Too many people know too many bad things about Hillary’s private, public and financial life. For instance, a former Secret Service agent who was stationed at the White House tells in a new book what a terrible temper she had. And that’s only the beginning. I’ve got boxes full of copied original documents from the 1990s investigation of the Clintons, and there’s stuff Hillary won’t want out. No time now to explain this all this, but — as I said before — the Democrats are going to wish Vice President Joe Biden had run.

One of the biggest defenders of government statistics made me chuckle last Friday when the Labor Department announced far-worse-than-expected job growth in May.

CNBC economist Steve Liesman joked that Washington was holding back jobs so it could report better numbers closer to the election.

So if Liesman thought that, he should also be questioning almost all the other government statistics being put out — just like I have. But that’s not really what is going to happen at the network: When bad news comes out, it tries to explain it away and blame something that couldn’t be anticipated.

Here are some fascinating tidbits that the Brookings Institution culled from questions it put into a Gallup survey.

Brookings discovered, for instance, that poor whites are now less optimistic than either poor blacks or poor Hispanics.

Why are poor blacks optimistic? Brookings says its information confirms the belief by some academics that blacks have high levels of resilience and a strong sense of community.

There was also what is called an “Obama Effect.”

“And despite visible manifestations of black frustration, as in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., and continued gaps in wage, mobility and education outcomes, there has been black progress,” according to Brookings.

And, it said, the black-white wage gap has also improved. Black males earned 69 percent of the median wage for white males in 1970. It was 75 percent by 2013.

Of course, black unemployment is still much higher than it is for whites.