WATCH THE MARKET’S REACTION TO THE JOBS REPORT

JOB losses: 50,000.

Let me spell it out because it looks a lot scarier in words – fifty thousand, comparable to a capacity crowd at Yankee Stadium.

That’s how many jobs Wall Street thinks the economy shed in March.

And that’s the number that investors will play off tomorrow when – at precisely 8:30 a.m. – the Labor Department makes perhaps the most important announcement on the economy this month.

I really don’t believe what I just wrote – “most importanta” – mainly because the monthly statistics from the Labor Department are about as trustworthy as those once spat out by the now defunct Soviet Politburo.

Back to my script.

Wall Street gasped when jobs were trimmed in the first month of this year. My readers weren’t surprised because they (like I) understand the statistical tricks of the trade used by the government in January.

But the loss of 63,000 jobs in February was a bit of a shock.

That’s a month when government numerical skullduggery should have produced an improvement in the employment situation.

I declined to make a prediction on the February job count and I’ll pass again this month. Why? Because sometimes the economy is at a turning point and no amount of effort is going to disguise what it’s really doing.

A glum Ben Bernanke testified before Congress yesterday and came about as close as a Federal Reserve chairman ever has to conceding that we are in a recession.

And since the Labor Department has been working on its Friday report all month I’m sure the Fed has been given advance warning on the March employment numbers.

So, will this be the third straight monthly decline in jobs? Could that possibly be allowed in this, a presidential election year?

Now for some insight.

In last March’s payroll report the government guessed that a generous 128,000 jobs were created by newly formed businesses. Back then this helped boost employment.

And a guesstimate of that size in what is called the birth/death model could make things look better than they really are this year too.

But the trick didn’t work in February – when the bureaucrats at the Labor Department added 118,000 make-believe jobs to no avail.

As I’ve said before – and this can be counted as a prediction – the best chance for a statistical recovery in jobs will be the April payroll number that comes out on May 2.

The folks at Labor are usually twice as generous in creating fictitious jobs during April than at any other time.

So that’s when you’ll start getting nonsensical comments about how the recession is ending because people are looking forward to spending that $600 rebate they’ll be getting from the US Treasury.

But let’s get back to more immediate concerns. What happens if the payroll report this Friday is as bad or even worse, than Wall Street is expecting?

Oddly, it’ll probably make investors happy. They’ll have yet another reason in a long list of them to expect more interest-rate cuts from the beleaguered Federal Reserve. (Never mind that the six so far haven’t done a hell of a lot of good.)

And what if the Labor Department’s wishful thinking and clever manipulation actually works and Friday’s number comes in stronger than expected – even if that only means fewer job losses?

Wall Street will probably still be happy.

After seeing the value of their stock portfolios shrink since last November, investors would love to see signs that the economy is improving.

Either way, the stock market wants to rally and looks like it can do so no matter what the next employment report reveals.

But don’t stop reading yet.

Despite the fact that stocks might improve for a while, the market right now is extremely dangerous.

And the upcoming corporate earnings season, just weeks away, is likely to be too much for the market to glide through.

*

At a hearing yesterday on Bear Stearns, Ron Paul (R-TX) told Ben Bernanke that he didn’t like The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets acting in secret and without records being kept of its decisions.

Well, bravo!

The Plunge Protection Team, as the Working Group is also called, may think it’s acting as the protector of all things financial – including the stock market – but we are all going to want to know who to hang if the organization’s meddling backfires.

And in case you are wondering about that nearly 400-point gain in the Dow Jones industrial average here on Tuesday, it started with a very suspicious overnight rally in the Standard & Poor’s 500 future contracts in Europe.

The Europe rally came after a sell-off in Japan.

Credit for the US rally was later given to the fact that Lehman Brothers was able to sell $4 billion in convertible securities.

But how could that be if stocks began their rally in Europe hours before Lehman said anything?

In case you are wondering, rigging S&P futures contracts is precisely how a Fed governor back in 1989 proposed fixing the stock market.

john.crudele@nypost.com