Today’s job numbers are as shocking as Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 Election – meaning they’re garbage. Here’s more on the unrealistic and dishonest reporting coming from the BLS.
We reported earlier on how today’s job numbers coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) made no sense:
Now we have more on these over-the-top numbers. Zerohedge reports:
For those who only look at headlines, today’s payrolls report was a veritable shock: coming in at 467K, it was almost 4x the consensus median expectation of 125K, and was orders of magnitude above Goldman’s forecast of -250K. Putting the stunning, 3-sigma beat in context, it came above all 78 estimates, and was more than double the highest forecast of 225K from HSBC. Even more ludicrous were historical adjustments which saw December increased from 199K to 510K, November from 249K to 647K and so on.
The plot thickens:
Well, here’s what happened. First, looking at just the December to January change we find that while the seasonally adjusted number rose by an impressive 467K, the unadjusted number collapsed, tumbling from 150.349 million to 147.525 million, a 2.8 million drop (as it tends to do every time the year shifts from December to January) meaning that the entire delta in the January number – somewhere in the 3+ million range – is due to arbitrary adjustments overlaid on top of the data…
…Focusing on just 2021, we find something curious: the stunning print from the summer which saw June and July print at or over 1 million, have been slashed by almost 50%, at the expense of most recent months such that October added 29K, November added 398K and December added 311K jobs to what was the original print only as a result of seasonal adjustments. Said otherwise, March-July was revised lower by -1,061,000 while Aug-Dec was revised up by +817,000.
Zerohedge goes on to note –
SouthBay Research notes in his NFP postmortem, “there has never been a January Seasonal Adjustment of this magnitude”
The overall theme is that the BLS apparently is now saying that they way overstated jobs this past summer and decided to move those overstatements to January.
We saw a similar approach taken by the Burea of Economic Analysis (BEA) to the GDP in 2018. President Trump’s numbers were too good, so the BEA reduced Trump’s numbers in 2017 and redistributed the increase in GDP to the Obama years.