Economic snow job

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The only professionals with a worse reputation than meteorologists for predicting the future are economists.

So what happens when practitioners of the dismal science have to incorporate the effects of the weather in their economic forecasts? You get a blizzard of bad calls.

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Throughout February, investors were told that we'd have to ignore much of the February economic data.

The rationale was that the massive amount of snowfall that paralyzed the East Coast would lead to weak numbers that wouldn't tell the true picture of the economy.

But a funny thing happened. Auto sales, unless you were Toyota (TM), were actually pretty good.

Many retailers, and not just ones that sell shovels, reported solid jumps in same-store sales. Teen clothing stores Zumiez (ZUMZ) and Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) emjoyed sizeable gains while department stores Macy's (M, Fortune 500) and Dillard's (DDS, Fortune 500) also shrugged off the snow.

"For all of the talk about the weather, people didn't just stay home and not spend. This is the winter. Snow is not a new phenomenon," said Michael Materasso, senior vice president of the fixed income group with money manager Franklin Templeton.

And to top it all off, Friday's February jobs report showed that Snowmageddon didn't lead to a bigger-than-expected jump in job losses or spike in unemployment after all.

So what now? It may be the case that the economy really is getting better and that not even a couple of feet of snow can derail this rebound.

"Maybe we are in a real recovery. You do have a lot of pent-up demand," said Bill Stone, chief Investment strategist with PNC Wealth Management in Philadelphia.

Sure, this is not a robust recovery. And for now, it remains a jobless one.

Robert Barbera, chief economist with Investment Technology Group, a brokerage in New York, said he thinks the snowstorms did have an effect on the jobs numbers.

He said payrolls may have been able to increase by more than 230,000 in February if not for the bad weather. So he argues that the weather did mask the recovery somewhat.

In addition, the strong sales growth from Ford (F, Fortune 500) and GM as well as many retailers have to be taken with a grain of rock salt.

Remember what was happening last February? People were afraid that the government was going to have to seize control of big banks to avoid another depression.

"We're comparing numbers against bad data from a year ago so that makes it look a lot better from the get-go," said Sean Snaith, director of the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Still, some of the doom and gloom predictions of monthly job losses in the 200,000 to 300,000 range didn't pan out. Materasso noted that some economists may have been relying on what happened in the winter of 1996 for their predictions.

The economy shed more than 200,000 jobs in a snowy January 1996, worse than was expected. Many blamed the weather.

"A few economists pointed to 1996 as another bad weather year. People looked back at that as evidence that the jobs numbers could be distorted," Materasso said.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that a bit of Wall Street and mainstream media navel-gazing probably played a role in painting an erroneous picture of an economy that was brought to a grinding halt in February.

John Canally, economist for LPL Financial, a broker-dealer based in Boston, said some economists and yes, the press, probably got caught in the typical trap of focusing too much on their own backyard and forgetting that the United States is a lot bigger than the original 13 colonies.

"There was some small economic impact from the weather but broadly, we spent too much time in the Northeast thinking that this is the only part of the country. There was an element of that happening with estimates for February," he said.

Reader comment of the week: Capitalism is apparently still alive and well. This remark from George Kerber in Thursday's market anniversaries column sparked a lively debate.

"I think people use the word 'greedy' to describe anyone that has more than they do. There is nothing wrong with developing a product and marketing it for the highest return."

-- The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica.