US payroll data are due out on Friday. It normally falls to columns like this to inveigh against absurdities such as the regular wild overreactions to US employment data. But in this case, Tim Bond of Barclays Capital in London has done a fine job himself in a research note.

According to Mr Bond: “This writer has always suspected that the bond market’s concentration on the payrolls number had very little to do with the economic import and a good deal to do with an endemic gambling dependency. Rather like roulette, the payrolls number is more or less random, but within a reasonably well-defined range. The economics profession sets the range for the roulette wheel and the random-number generation techniques of the Bureau of Labor Statistics do the rest.”